Gunsmith Apprentice's Introduction to Mass Effect Weaponry
by BJ Hanssen
Summary: This guide is intended as a basic primer for aspiring gunsmiths. This is a codex-type fic written in-character (as Aaron Close of MI:CC), discussing the fictional technologies relating to Mass Effect weaponry, and can be considered a companion piece to Mass Intelligence: Close Call.
1. Introduction to Mass Effect weaponry

**Introduction**

This guide is intended as a basic primer for aspiring gunsmiths. In it, you will find explanations for, and information about, the basic mechanics of mass effect-based weapons, their construction, various case studies, best practices, and some history lessons. This is the sixtieth edition of this best-selling guide, and the first rewrite by a human editor; Aaron Close, owner, CEO, and Chief Engineer of the Close Corporation.

 **Mechanics**

Understanding the mechanics of a mass effect weapon requires a basic understanding of mechanics and mass-energy relations, what humans refer to as Newtonian mechanics and relativity. The key concepts to recall are the basic laws of mechanics, universally postulated by every species in the galaxy:

 **1** **st** **law** : An object in motion stays in motion unless acted on by an external force.

 **2** **nd** **law** : The sum of forces on an object is equal to the mass of the object multiplied by its acceleration, giving the famous equation **F = ma**.

 **3** **rd** **law** : Any action has an equal and opposite reaction; any force exerted on an object by another, is met by a force equal in magnitude and opposite in direction on the first object.

Further, an understanding of a basic tenet of mass-energy relations in physics is required: Mass can be considered concentrated energy, according to the formula **E=mc** **2** , which states that the total energy of an object is equal to its mass times the square of the speed of light.

What these laws tell us about weapons is that an energy-based weapon – lasers, for instance – must output an unrealistic amount of energy in order to equal the energy output of a mass accelerator weapon firing projectiles at relativistic velocities. Which leads to the first law of gunsmithing: For any reasonable and achievable energy production on the scale of a usable weapon, the acceleration of a mass will always have a higher energy output potential than any reasonably comparable directed energy weapon.

Another key principle informed by these laws is that the energy output – the _power_ – of a mass accelerator weapon is determined by the product of the projectile's mass and its muzzle velocity, in simplified terms. And since projectile mass is naturally limited – lugging around ten kilo rifle projectiles is an absurd proposition – the main modifier to stopping power is how fast the projectile is moving. This is where mass effect mechanics come in.

Mass effect generators allow us to temporarily lower the mass of a projectile enough that it is essentially negligible, which in turn allows us to accelerate the projectile to significant fractions of the speed of light. This allows us to produce enormous energy output even with tiny projectiles. However, once the projectile leaves the accelerating barrel of the weapon, the mass effect field dissipates and the projectile regains its mass. This generates a lot of inertia on the projectile, which begins to disintegrate from friction and veer off course almost immediately.

The result is that mass effect weapons generally have relatively short in-atmosphere range, but due to the immense velocity of the projectile it will still travel a significant distance before being affected by these effects. Which brings about one of the most basic problems in mass effect gunsmithing: Optimisation.

Broadly speaking, weapon optimisation is an exercise in compromise; you can optimise for range, accuracy, stopping power, rate of fire, and penetration, but generally not for all of them. Accuracy and range are tightly linked, and generally optimising accuracy can be done independently of the others, though it is obviously limited by the weapon's range. Accuracy optimisation is done primarily through alignment calibration of the weapon's accelerator and guiding rails, which is a complex science unto itself. Range is adjusted by varying the grain size and velocity of the round, where larger projectiles with lower speeds _generally_ will achieve better range, but there are compromises to be made there as well. The size and shape of a projectile affects its maximum range, that is the distance at which it disintegrates and/or veers sharply off course due to aerodynamic forces (drag, friction), but it is in turn modified by the velocity at which it is fired. Optimising for stopping power with higher velocity generally decreases range, as larger projectiles are required, rate of fire optimisation involves a lot of work on heat management which often means compromises on velocity and grain size, and penetration is a whole other ballgame with a myriad approaches with their own advantages and disadvantages.

 **The basic structure of a mass accelerator**

Most common mass accelerator weapons are constructed according to the following basic blueprint:

1\. An ammo block, from which projectiles are crafted

2\. An ammo shaver, which uses strong micro-scale mass effect fields to sheer off projectiles from the ammo block with varying degrees of precision

3\. A loading chamber, wherein the shaved projectile is mass-reduced and inserted into the barrel

4\. The mass effect generator, which reduces the mass of the projectile and powers the weapon

5\. A trigger assembly, which operates the weapon

6\. Accelerator rails, which accelerate the projectile through the barrel

7\. Guide rails, which controls the trajectory of the projectile through the barrel

8\. A heat sink assembly, which siphons off heat produced by and in the various parts of the weapons and prevents the weapon from overheating and melting down

9\. A VI-controlled self-repair mechanism, which usually forces the weapon into a cooldown mode, vents excess heat, and allows recovery of melted-down components

Additionally, you will often find that many mass accelerator weapons sport a secondary barrel assembly. Most commonly, this is used as an exhaust mechanism of sorts, where excess chips and grit, which naturally accumulates within the weapon's mechanism, is accelerated out and away from the weapon. Often, these barrels indicate the use of low-cost and imprecise ammo shavers, which produce a significant amount of waste metal as it shaves projectiles. However, it is not necessarily an indicator of a poor weapon, as manufacturers have found clever ways to make use of this material. For example, the most common way to produce concussive shots is by overcharging the waste ejector, accumulating more waste in the waste loader, compressing it, and accelerating it out of the second barrel at velocities it's normally not designed to handle. This will always damage the weapon and engage the self-repair mechanism, which is why concussive shots can't usually be fired in rapid succession.

Other manufacturers have had some success in adding a compressor component which compresses and shapes waste material in the waste loader, and fires it like a 'bonus projectile' through the secondary barrel at regular intervals. Others still have had success in modifying other designs with high-end shavers that produce little to no waste, and upgrading the secondary barrel to work as a fully functional secondary barrel assembly, thereby increasing the weapon's firing rate and/or stopping power or penetration by fully utilising both barrels. We will cover a few ways in which manufacturers have made use of the secondary barrel in the extensive case study section of the book.

 **Different weapon classes, different design decisions**

Different use scenarios often require different types of weapons, and this has lead to a wide variety of weapon classifications in a very malleable taxonomy. Broadly speaking, the most common weapons on the galactic market today fall into these categories:

1\. Pistols

2\. Submachine guns (SMGs)

3\. Shotguns

4\. Assault rifles

5\. Sniper rifles

This taxonomy is not without its controversies. For instance, it combines the categories of light pistols and hand cannons, which is particularly controversial since many consider some of the most common pistols on the market today to be SMGs that default to semi-automatic firing modes. However, the taxonomy has been chosen based on the design mechanics that make up the weapons that fit into the different categories, as well as their different use modes. Though even this causes some problems, for example with where you should place some marksman's rifles.

In this introductory chapter, I shall briefly cover these standard classifications of mass effect weaponry, their mechanics, their use, their place in the market, and some history.

 **Pistols and SMGs**

Broadly speaking, pistols use one of two types of ammo shavers; either a high-precision, low-mass capable shaver, or a lower-precision, high-mass capable shaver. The former is also ubiquitous in SMG design, while the latter is often seen in assault rifles. Generally, higher-mass varieties belong to the hand cannon variation of the pistol theme, while the lower-mass variety belong to the light pistol type. Almost no pistols come with a single barrel, as the shavers that are precise enough to cut out the waste are usually too big to fit within the frame of a pistol.

This size limitation is the greatest limitation to the output power of a pistol, and is the reason why the distinction between a hand cannon – a weapon that fires high-powered rounds, but with a limited clip and firing rate – and a light pistol, which is essentially just an SMG in semi-automatic mode, exists. The only true distinction between an SMG and a light pistol is the semi-automatic default, and that light pistols generally fire slightly larger rounds with more stopping power and less penetration.

One benefit of the limited frame is that heat generation scales exponentially, which means that lower-powered weapons make progressively less heat, which means that at the scale of a pistol you can limit yourself to a much smaller heat sink assembly. As an example, the relatively compact heat sink assembly of the legendary M7 Lancer assault rifle takes up about 30 percent of the weapon's internal volume, while a Kessler K2 light pistol's heat sink volume is at about 8%. This is why a pistol frame can produce stopping power equal to low-powered sniper rifles in the case of some hand cannons, or firing rates equal to some assault rifles. SMGs are optimised for firing rate and penetration, which allows them to minimise the shaver and loader assembly as well, increasing their firing rate well beyond what even a machine gun can achieve.

 **Shotguns**

Among the standard weapon types, shotguns may be the type with the widest variety of designs. However, the basic functionality of the weapon is usually quite straightforward: Propel multiple projectile masses at a target, with less attention to accuracy than other guns. Of course, there are the odd exceptions, such as slug-based shotguns, but generally all shotguns fall into this functionality model.

The most common, and by far the cheapest, design of a shotgun uses an array of ammo shavers to shave projectiles in parallel before loading into the loading chamber or barrel. Usually, these are shavers designed for pistol frames that are simply connected together and controlled by some VI hack-job. Shotguns are otherwise identified by their wide barrel, necessary to allow its multiple projectiles. Conveniently, the wider barrel allows the use of more guide- and acceleration rails, increasing either accuracy (in the sense of 'true flight' of the projectile) or projectile velocity for higher stopping power. Most shotgun designs, however, stick to the standard cross-structure of four guide rails, filling the wider gaps with more acceleration rails to increase the power of the weapon. The exceptions usually belong to the subcategory of slug-guns, such as the Alliance's Crusader series, though some higher-end specialist shotguns also sport an increased number of guide rails in order to accommodate medium-range engagements. Such weapons are popular choices with biotics, as they often move between very close quarter and medium-range engagements very rapidly.

Additionally, 3rd party guide rail barrel extensions make up a popular modification market for shotguns, and allow users to tailor their weapon to better suit their combat profile. Interestingly, the hunting market holds a nearly 40% market share for these extensions.

 **Assault rifles**

About 90% of assault rifles use the same ammo shavers used for most hand cannons, which combines with greater heat capacity and longer barrels to allow a higher firing rate without compromising too much on stopping power. And with the significantly larger frame volume of assault rifles, designers have a lot more freedom to optimise for specific purposes. As an example, since military operations usually involve a large number of operators, it is generally more purposeful to equip soldiers with weapons with _sufficient_ stopping power combined with a _high_ and _sustainable_ rate of fire. This is why nearly all standard military assault rifles are medium-powered bullet hoses. The Lancer, the Avenger, and the Turian Phaeston models, to name a few, all fit this general description. Beyond that, they are all designed to be reliable, which is a much more interesting design challenge.

Reliability begins and ends with heat management. Any and all weapons that are considered reliable by military standards are capable of handling heat generation much quicker than the competition, and to dissipate that heat away from internal components quickly and efficiently. Often, this involves some process of continuous self-repair of the heat sink medium, a technique known as dynamic heat sinking. A common, but somewhat expensive technique is to use a metal with relatively poor internal heat conductivity and a relatively low melting point, which 'melts away' at the heated surface and is then captured and re-processed. Fabricators continuously extrude heat sink material into contact with the heating surfaces, which effectively means that the heat sink is continuously replaced. This is the method used in the design of such weapons as the famous Revenant machine gun, and is also the reason why it takes so long to cool down after it has finally been brought to overheat. When such systems overheat, the fabricators break down and must be repaired. Additionally, the melted heat sink medium has to be collected and re-processed, which takes time, and new heat sinks must be extruded into contact with the heating surfaces. This is a massively complex process, and militaries tend to shun this particular technique both because of its cost and because they consider this complexity as detracting from the weapon's reliability.

The M-7 Lancer, by contrast, casts its entire barrel assembly, and most of its mass effect generator, in a permanent heatsink containing a liquid metal internal medium. The outer layer of the heatsink is structured to encourage self-arrangement of the molecules of heatsink material within it, which mechanically automates most of the self-repair required in the case of an overheat. Essentially, as the weapon cools itself down, the melted internals of the heatsinks cool into their appropriate structures, with internal pressures and material separation leaving the liquid metal medium a liquid. This is the secret behind the weapon's famed reliability, and it allows for a quite compact heat sink assembly by the standards of other assault rifles. Even when compared with the newer M-8 Avenger models, based on the same basic designs, the 30%-by-volume figure is impressive, as the A2 Avenger model comes it at nearly 35%-by-volume. The reason for this is that while impressive, the M7's heatsink assembly is rather expensive, as it contains minimal standardised parts. This wasn't a problem prior to the Alliance's introduction to the wider galaxy, as this assembly was _the_ standard, but the economies of scale quickly changed that and necessitated the development of the Avenger line to replace the Lancer.

No discussion of assault rifles would be complete without discussing marksman's rifles. These are rifles that optimise for stopping power and/or penetration, and of course for accuracy, and compromise on firing rates. What separates marksman's rifles from sniper rifles, is that they do this within the standard frame envelope of an assault rifle, with relatively short, assault-rifle calibre barrels as well as significantly reduced range which makes medium-range engagements the optimal range compared with the long-range optimum for sniper rifles. The higher accuracy compared to regular assault rifles is achieved mainly by replacing some accelerator rails with guide rails, and compensating for the lost acceleration with a larger-calibre projectile. But at this scale, and particularly with specialist weapons such as marksman's rifles, other effects are often significant enough to enter into design decisions.

For example, projectile shaping techniques are relatively common with assault rifles and larger-frame weapons. Different shapes provide different flight and penetration profiles, which significantly affect the use of the weapon. Shaped projectiles can provide greater penetrative abilities, or greater stopping power, or otherwise different damage profiles such as projectiles that flatten or shatter on impact, causing greater damage to organic tissues. Shaping usually occurs in one of two places: The loading chamber, or the shaver. The former tends to dramatically reduce firing rates, while the latter is significantly more expensive but a lot more adaptable.

A third manner of projectile shaping is found in that class of weapons that flout the standard ammo block design by employing omni-gel fabrication of projectiles, such as the infamous Graal shotgun or the Batarian Kishock 'harpoon gun'. While neither of these are classified as assault rifles, they still offer perhaps the best examples of inventive projectile shaping. These weapons replace the ammo block and -shaver with an omni-gel deposit and flash fabricator assembly, similar to what is found in the common omni-tool, used to flash forge their projectiles on demand. Such weapons _always_ fire at significantly lower velocities than more standard mass effect weaponry, since the significantly increased mass and volume of the projectile means that applying a mass effect field to the entire projectile takes much longer and produces a lot more heat than normal. This is why these weapons often offer different firing modes, charged and non-charged, where the non-charged mode applies only minimal mass effect enhancement, and charged mode applies a mass effect field to the entire projectile for dramatically increased velocity and resulting energy output.

The fact that such weapons effectively incorporate omni-tool capabilities within the weapon's frame has made some more adventurous designers toy with ideas of fabricating specialised munitions, such as explosives of various types, based on the idea of modifying omni-too-constructed tech mine designs to fit into a projectile envelope. So far, none of these attempts have panned out, though it is a poorly kept secret that every major manufacturer and military R&D service have ongoing research projects dedicated at developing such technology.

 **Sniper rifles**

A class of weapons nearly as diverse as shotguns, the sniper rifle market is massively diversified and constantly changing. A common differentiator is the dichotomy of the 'specialist' and 'support' sniper, where the former holds the more traditional sniper role, keeping at a distance from the fighting in a recon and assassination role, and the latter is the more modern variant that takes its place on the front lines alongside other soldiers. Not many modern militaries still use the traditional sniper, as most recon duties are performed by drones or front-line infiltrators, who are generally classified under the support sniper category. However, the traditional market is still big enough that weapons are developed especially for it. These weapons tend to be larger-bore, longer-range weapons, with the legendary M-98 Widow being one of the longest-serving weapon frames still in active service.

Weapons in this class negatively affect the user's mobility in a major way, such that it is known that professional assassins will often simply leave their rifles behind – often destroying them as they do so – rather than lug them around and risk the weapon slowing them down enough to be captured. So these weapons are most commonly used in fire teams or mounted on light vehicles. There are also examples of attempts at mounting such weapons on mech frames, as they are generally less impeded by their massive size and weight. However, most such attempts have failed due to the stutter-motion problem shared by most VI-run mech systems, as it makes accurate fire at range a very difficult proposition.

Most of the common sniper rifle models on the market sit squarely in the support sniper/infiltrator class market, with just a few being capable of more traditional deployments given the right 3rd party modifications and adjustments. Broadly speaking, infiltrator rifles balance guide rails and accelerator rails at a nearly 50/50 ratio, which greatly increases accuracy compared to assault rifles (and even marksman rifles), and only lowers velocity slightly since the gain/loss per guide rail is of a greater magnitude than the gain/loss per accelerator rail. The larger frame allows for better heat management, however, so the rails can be up-tuned compared to assault rifles, which means nearly all sniper rifles fire at greater velocities compared to any assault rifle.

The greatest variation in this market is in projectile size and shape. Nearly all higher-end infiltrator rifles incorporate projectile shaping technology to improve the flight and/or impact profiles of the projectile, and the same 3rd party modification can have dramatically different effects and efficiency from one weapon to the next because of these subtle differences. This is part of why the sniper rifle is still considered a weapon for the truly skilled, as much care and maintenance is required to optimise them, and the optimisation potential is similarly vast. Very slight changes to the calibration of the guide rails can in some cases result in double-digit gains in accuracy and power. Few weapons differentiate so much based on its user's skill as does the sniper rifle.

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...

 **Author's notes** : I do not own the Mass Effect.

Figure I would try something different, here. Part of the work I've put into MI:CC includes a lot of theorising about how mass effect weapons and other technologies actually _work_. I've got it all pretty well figure out now. This work will cover some specific weapons, as well as mods, ammo mods, design quirks, and such things. For example, there's going to be a whole chapter dedicated just to the secondary barrel concept, and things like Warp Ammo.

The idea here is that I'm sticking to what we know from canon, and elaborating on that. None of what I write here should be directly _counter_ to canon, and much of it will in fact provide necessary explanations for how these things can possibly work, for example the whole mechanic behind the Kishock, or why ME guns appear to have such short ranges (generally speaking). The ammo mod bit is also going to be... interesting. Essentially, this project is me trying to make cohesive sense of what some game designers threw together because it played well. Fun times :)


	2. Weapon ranks: Citadel and Terminus Model

**Citadel Standard – The Rank Model**

Arms manufacturing and sales within the Council's economic catchment area is a highly regulated affair, though most of the regulation relates to economic and market barriers rather than mechanical limitations. Gun laws in Council space vary significantly from nation to nation, colony to colony, and plenty of minor manufacturers and resellers operate exclusively within areas that share a certain legal standard not shared throughout Council space. Larger manufacturers, however, have to operate across multiple such standards. Usually, they will default to what is known as the Council Standard of Gun Regulation, which is a document produced by the Chamber of Arms Manufacturers and _not_ by the Citadel Council. This document does double duty as a legal guideline and a manufacture-to-market model.

Specifically, the document outlines what's known commonly as the 'gun rank' model, wherein weapons are ranked on a scale from 1-10, where each step on the scale reflects certain capabilities of the weapon. At least, that was the intention initially. In 2133 CE, the Council passed a law that linked gun regulation to the gun rank scale, effectively outlawing weapons that did not fit on the scale and instituting a rank validation scheme. This move hugely benefitted three manufacturers in particular: the Volus-owned Elkoss Combine, the Turian manufacturer Armax Arsenal, and the now-defunct Serrice Council Arms branch. The regulation was seen in the context of wider, subtle efforts to undermine Batarian economic interests, as the new rules effectively all but banned all existing lines of Batarian State Arms weapons from Council space, as the only major manufacturer that did not comply with the Standard ten-rank model.

The law forced manufacturers to submit their base model weapons – rank 1 – to licensing inspection by C-Sec, and limited all weapons ranked 5 or higher to military and PMC use only. The ranking system itself is a bit strange, as only the first four ranks are strictly defined in terms of _material capability_ , a term which seems rather nebulous and covers a legal framework that is complex enough to deserve its own book. The essence of it, if it is at all possible to boil it down to such, is that no rank 4 weapon should be _better_ (as defined by this framework) than any active-duty military-grade weapon of the same class. Simplistically, this would mean that no rank 4 weapon should have better core stats than any rank 5 (military grade) weapon, but in practice it means all rank 4 weapons are compared up against the average service weapon of the same class in the major militaries (Hierarchy, STG, Alliance, and – curiously – Hegemony). Again, this must be seen in the context of the economic campaign against the Hegemony: The Hegemony military is generally issued basic-grade Batarian State Arms weaponry, which means that _by definition_ BSA rank 4 weapons would outclass the average service weapon in its own military, thus excluding their weapons from licensing unless the Hegemony invests in re-arming their entire military, which is highly unlikely.

Military grade weapons, on the other hand, are all ranked relative to their own base model. That is, to the military grade base model. This is why you will sometimes see manufacturers produce different models entirely for the mass market and the military market. My own company, Close Corporation, has done this with its Avenger line of weapons, where the A2 model is mil-spec only, and the A3 model covers ranks 1-4 only. Because of the peculiarities of the rank model, not only is this allowed, but it also allows us to include features in the A3 model that the A2 does not have, such as automatic block-shaver distance adjustment. By some measures, but A3 model is a superior weapon to the A2 weapon across most ranks, but crucially this is not the case at _any_ rank in terms of _material capability_. As I said, good luck trying to understand that system. In practical terms, its most significant effect is to keep smaller manufacturers from penetrating the galactic market by necessitating the hiring of an expensive team of 'legal designers', arms design consultants with a certification in the rank model.

 **Terminus model**

Whereas the Council's standard is defined largely through legal frameworks, intellectual property regulation, market control, and heavy-handed cronyism in favour of the large arms manufacturers, the Terminus model is simple anarchy. There is no viable concept of intellectual property to speak of, no regulation, and the only market control is violence and treats. This means that the Terminus market is a completely different beast from the Council market, with an entirely separate selection of weaponry for sale, and generally a lot more creativity to be found. It is, of course, also a much, much more dangerous place to work as a gunsmith, and many talented engineers are 'picked up' by PMCs, warlords, and other interested entities in order to secure their services. This has brought about a market dominated by the larger actors such as BSA and the Blood Pack, but with weapons available from a wide variety of smaller manufacturers as well.

Often, some weapons are only manufactured and available in very narrow regions, with one infamous example being the Redcliffe Carbine, a weapon designed and manufactured in the Redcliffe trenches by rebels and invading Coalition soldiers during the early phases of the Terminus Wars. A few guns have made their way into Council space, but they have yet to be replicated in any usable manner, as the home-brew VI and VI controllers that run it have proved tricky to copy. To this day, the original factory on Redcliffe is the only manufacturer capable of producing this weapon, favoured by mercenaries across the Terminus for its rugged reliability, solid stopping power, and high accuracy.

Because the Rank Model is so tied in to the standard mass accelerator construction, weapons like the Graal spike thrower and the BSA's Kishock harpoon gun are unlikely to ever be legal in Council space. The public narrative is that these weapons are explicitly banned because of their 'brutality', but the reality of the matter is that they simply wouldn't fit into the model, and as they use omni-gel and flash fabricators in place of the ammo block and shaver they are impossible to license as they can't be compared based on _material capability_. This, again, is not an issue in the Terminus and outer Traverse, where these weapons are freely traded and carried.

As a result, weapon grades in the Terminus are completely different from in Council space, and largely heterogeneous. However, there are some commonalities. The basic models of any weapon tends to be manufactured with cheap materials and components, which brings lower heat capacities, lower power, slower mass effect field cycling for lower firing rates, and lower projectile mass to fit with the smaller mass effect engines. Upgrades from the basic model usually switch one or all components to better varieties, though they are still limited by their frame envelope and basic design, which limits how much better a weapon can get from its basic model even with all the best materials and components for the weapon.

This is why weapons like the Scimitar compact shotgun, for example, will never be able to compete on raw power with larger shotguns. That, however, does not make it a bad product; the Scimitar is one of the most widely used shotguns in Terminus space, and is often imported to Council space by special forces soldiers and Spectres. There is a key lesson to learn here for aspiring gunsmiths: Weapons are tools, and bigger tools are not always better. Know the limits of your design, and try to fit those limits into a feature frame. For the Scimitar, those limit-feature conversions lie in realising that its compact size limits its power output, so the designer – realising that shotguns are primarily short-range weapons – increased the grain size, dramatically lowered velocity, and oversized the eezo core for its frame and velocity to allow higher cycling frequency. The result was a weapon that was short on power, but compact, fast-firing, and high-force, making it a perfect weapon for front-line biotics and and combat techs, and an excellent backup side-arm replacement. Interestingly, the Scimitar is an improved version of Ariake Technologies' Katana line of Council space shotguns. This is interesting because the Scimitar is an older design than the Katana, commissioned by the Eclipse PMC for their Terminus operations. The Katana, then, was Ariake's effort at making the Scimitar compliant with Council regulations. There aren't too many examples of this, as usually Terminus designs do not easily translate into Council-appropriate varieties, but the Katana/Scimitar example is one that is often used to illustrate these differences. These two weapons will be covered in more detail later in this book, as the specifics and differences of their designs highlight important lessons about both weapon design in general and market adjustments specifically.

 **3** **rd** **party modifications**

The 3rd party modification market will get its own separate chapter in the book, and some types of mods will also be covered in-depth with their own chapters. However, it is worth covering some basic information about mod markets in relation to the different design models of Council space and the Terminus.

The modification market in Council space can be divided into three: Legal mass-market mods, military-grade mods, and illicit mods. There is significant overlap between the military-grade market and the illicit market, with military-grade mods being explicitly illegal for mass-market sale, and some mods being illegal even for the military market. Of course, in the Terminus, there is no such thing as 'illegal', generally speaking, but being a mod engineer in the Traverse or Terminus is very dangerous work. Good mod engineers are highly sought after, and arms manufacturers and military organisations alike actively search for talent and 'acquire' it by any means. If this is the market in which you work, or wish to work, remember that the most important thing is your own safety, and you should probably align yourself with an accredited organisation as quickly as possible. Freelancers generally don't survive long, unless they are both extremely talented and very adept at keeping themselves safe.

The types of mods available for weapons is somewhat different between these markets. In the Terminus, most mods are sold as stand-alone products for specific weapon models. This makes sense; the wide variety of weapons in this area of space means there is little standardisation for mod manufacturers to work with. This is also part of the reason why mod engineers are so sought after, because it means that the majority of the weapons in the Terminus and the outer Traverse require either bespoke modifications or highly specialised, small-manufacturer mods. Even the weapons that are widely available throughout these regions will usually require some level of expert adjustment to fit, as there is no guarantee that one Scimitar shotgun is made by the same manufacturer, to the same specs, as the next. And with weapons such as the Blood Pack's Executioner hand cannon, there cannot be such a thing as a standardised line of modifications, simply because no two Executioners are the same. This is why you will often hear Terminus modders talk of _weapon platforms_ , referring to the basic design and frame of any given weapon model. They can't rely on standardised construction in the same way Council space modders can, and therefore tend to build their mods 'half-way' before adjusting each mod to the individual weapon.

It should be noted that the term _mod_ in the Terminus refers not to any 3rd party modification made to a weapon, but rather to _3_ _rd_ _party components_ created to modify a weapon with a specific purpose. That is, things like material upgrades and standardised component upgrades do not count as mods in this region, though they _do_ in Council space. A Terminus weapon mod can be a rail/barrel extension, projectile shear field muzzle (also known as "cranial trauma systems"), aftermarket scopes, piercing mods and so on, but standard Council mods like barrel variations, optics upgrades, heat sink upgrades, frictionless barrel coatings, and so on, do not count as mods in the Terminus. Rather, they are considered _upgrades_ , which is a different matter. The reason for this is that such upgrades can be done fairly simply for any weapon, Terminus or Council, but mods require a level of expertise that is highly sought after in the Terminus.

This distinction does not exist in Council space, where the 3rd party market produces material and component upgrades as well as various weapon modifications, and use the terms _mod_ and _upgrade_ interchangeably. Additionally, because Council weapons are generally standardised in many ways, most mods can be fitted to most weapons: There is nothing stopping you from removing your scram rail upgrade from your assault rifle and fitting it to your pistol, for example, though you are likely to end up with a few spare rails. And mods like 3rd party optics, sensors, and sights generally fit onto standardised rails and fittings on the weapon. Heat sink mods are actually poorly named heat vents, which is the component the internal heat sinks 'dump' their heat to, which explains the limited potential of such mods. Frictionless material mods are far more effective, reducing heat production rather than increasing the weapon's ability to handle the heat produced. Ordinarily, such upgrades come in the form of inserts or coatings, though the higher-end varieties are generally full component replacements (barrel, shaver, rails).

Finally, I am compelled to remind you that ammo modifications are wholly different from weapon modifications, and will be covered by separate chapters.

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...

 **Author's notes: I do not own the Mass Effect.**

This has had a decent reception so far, really, especially since I've not yet been able to advertise it anywhere (new MI:CC chapter still some time out, sadly). Just to be clear: Updates to this story will not delay updates to MI:CC. Most of what I'm writing here is either already written in my background notes, or clearly outlined in my mind. The actual typing out of it isn't time consuming, nor does it require much effort.

The different chapters of this book will cover different mods, upgrades, and other concepts of Mass Effect weapons, as well as case studies of various weapons within the lore (including some MI:CC-specific weapons, such as the already-mentioned Avenger A2 and A3 models). Not all weapons will be covered here, though, at least not immediately. Most of Close's weapons are experimental, industrial secrets that it wouldn't make sense to reveal in a widely publicised book (which is what this is written as). However, I might release some of that as 'redacted chapters', for 'internal Close Corporation use only'.

To answer **TacoWrath** (by the way, check out his story, Murphy's Law), yeah, the book will cover the basics of starship-scale weaponry as well. Not in too much depth, since such weapons generally are designed by specialised engineers rather than gunsmiths, and are usually designed for specific ship models rather than stand-alone weapons. Exceptions exist, such as GARDIAN point defense lasers and (later on) the Thanix system, but even they tend to become variations on a theme depending on the specifics of the ship they're built into.

Oh, and it's important to note that initially this book will only cover ME1-era weaponry. No sign of thermal clips here. However, once we've moved in that direction in MI:CC, the dramatic changes brought about by this design innovation will also be covered here. Somehow :)


	3. Ammo modifications: The basics

Modifying ammunition is often portrayed as a straight-forward process, and to the end-user it often is; buy the mod package, install it following simple-ish instructions, and then activate the mod when you want it according to the instruction manual. But in engineering terms, ammo modding it is one of the most complicated fields of weapons engineering. Different kinds of modified ammo vary wildly on everything from the physics at play to how the ammo is applied. This is most evident with warp ammunition, which isn't a technologically applied modification but rather one that can only be applied by trained biotics. Warp ammo belongs to a class of ammo modification often referred to by engineers as _block mods_ , as the mod is applied directly to the ammo block (or omni-gel reservoir, with weapons such as for example the Graal or Kishock). This category contains most mass-market ammo mods, typical examples being warp ammo, incendiary or inferno ammo, snowblind rounds, and most toxic ammo mods.

The block mod category can itself be divided into two; replacements and applications. A replacement block mod is, as the name suggests, a non-standard ammo block that simply replaces the block in your weapon. The most common example of a replacement block mod is tungsten armour piercing ammo blocks. An applied block mod, on the other hand, is a modification to the standard block, such as warp ammo or snowblind rounds. With either category, the modification to the block itself can be thought of as the standard, basic mod, with rank improvements in the form of adjustments to shaver, loading chamber, and barrel mechanics.

Generally speaking, gunsmiths don't do much work on ammo modification without specialising specifically in that area, but those that do tend to be in high demand. The work in this field is rather demanding, with high-quality, high-precision metamaterial construction being of primary concern. Ammo modders (rightly) consider themselves separate from the gunsmith profession, and have developed their own vernacular that could be confusing to those who are not part of the profession. For example, they speak of "the five paths", that is the five parts of the weapon involved in ammo modification:

The block, meaning the ammo block

The pick, meaning the ammo shaver

The hole, meaning the loading chamber

The well, meaning the barrel assembly

The plug, short for plug-ins, a reference to weapon extensions that modify ammunition (for example, cranial trauma systems)

"The plug" is an interesting one; plug mods nearly straddle the line between weapon mods and ammo mods, but the theoretical differentiator is the same as the general difference between weapon and ammo mods: That where weapon mods change a weapon's functionality or mechanics, ammo mods modify the round itself. To illustrate the difference, consider the heavy barrel and the cranial trauma system: The heavy barrel allows larger grain size and higher velocities, thus changing the mechanics of the weapon, while the CTS applies a differential shear field to the round as it passes through the muzzle attachment. The CTS, then, only modifies the projectile.

This, of course, is a simplified explanation. In practice, CTS systems vary in effectiveness through application of various adjustments to the other parts of the weapon's mechanics, the other 'paths' that ammo modders speak of. It is practically impossible to draw a clear line between ammo modification and weapon modification, as you will inevitably come across seemingly absurd distinctions such as that between piercing mods and basic ammo piercing ammunition. Some modders refuse to call AP mods that do not include a block mod component an ammo mod at all, even though according to Council law any modification that increases the armour penetrating capability of the projectile above its rank baseline counts as an armour piercing ammunition modification.

No resolution to these issues is likely to come around anytime soon, barring any significant changes to the standard mechanics of mass effect weaponry (which hasn't happened in hundreds of years, since the invention of the separate guide rail). Regardless, it is still useful for gunsmiths to be aware of the various ammo mods out there, how they work and what kinds of impact they may have on the weapon. Mod compatibility is one of the primary sales drivers across the galaxy, after all. The rest of this chapter will cover the primary categories of ammunition mods: Anti-materiel, anti-personnel, anti-barrier, and speciality ammunition.

 **Anti-materiel**

Anti-materiel ammunition, in common parlance referred to as AP ammo or AP mods, is ammunition modified to penetrate armour and cause increased damage to materiel; that is, vehicles, drones, turrets, light structures and so on. In Council space, AP mods are restricted to military and law enforcement, though the AP modding market is the largest illegal mod market in this region of the galaxy. AP ammo is also by far the most common ammo mod category in general, at nearly twice the market size of the second largest market share held by force-increasing ammunition types such as Hammerhead rounds.

To increase armour penetration, mod designers have used many tricks over the years. The most basic mod these days is the simple block mod, most commonly the tungsten block. A common misconception about tungsten ammo is that its AP capability comes from its increased density and projectile mass, but that's not true. Those factors give a generally greater damage output, but the property that provides AP is the material deformity of the projectile, or rather the lack of it. Tungsten projectiles maintain their shape better upon impact, penetrating deeper into solids than most other comparable metal projectiles which generally flatten upon impact.

However, because of the miniscule size of mass effect munitions, grain deformity alone doesn't increase armour piercing capacity by more than 10-15%. Any gains above that threshold come in the form of adjustments to the shaver, loading chamber, or barrel assembly. That statement may seem familiar to you, and indeed these are the same types of adjustments talked of in the previous chapter. However, the difference here is that the specific adjustments made are made with the ammunition type in mind. For example, shaving projectiles into various wedge shapes, applying a hardening coating in the loading chamber, or spinning the projectile as it passes through the barrel to give it a 'drilling' effect on impact. The best AP mods on the market generally applies a combination of all of these methods, which is a trend you will recognise with most of the ammo mods we will cover in this chapter.

 **Anti-personnel**

This is a rather broad category, including any ammo type which specifically increases damage dealt to soft and/or organic targets. Most ammunition types in this category are explicitly illegal throughout Council space, including for military uses, though they are known to be in widespread use across the galaxy and even in many militaries, particularly in special forces. Famously, the Batarian military is widely reported to use the edge case Harpoon round, which qualifies both as AP and anti-personnel ammunition. This is a round that hardens on impact to penetrate armour, then shreds into the underlying softer flesh. The mod is only produced by Batarian State Arms, and is installed by default on all Hegemony service weapons. It sees little to no spread outside of the Hegemony military, as most people consider it an inferior compromise solution relative to the significantly more effective specialised ammunition types such as tungsten ammo and shredder ammo.

The latter is probably the most well-known anti-personnel round on the market. Shredder rounds is to the more standard variations on the hollow point round what a scalpel is to a knife; whereas the standard anti-personnel round deforms on impact to shred flesh, shredder rounds split apart on impact to penetrate the flesh before the fragments deform inside the target.

Though saying that the shredder round is the most well known ammo of this category is a bit misleading, since the category includes one of the most popular ammunition types in the galaxy: Incendiary ammo. Though they are popularly considered useful for their armour weakening properties, they are primarily an anti-personnel round. The original inferno round was initially designed by the Turians during the Krogan Rebellions as a direct counter to Krogan regeneration. Broadly speaking, there are two types of incendiary ammunition: The standard thermionic soft-metal round, which is a plain block mod, and the modern inferno round, which applies a reactive coating to the thermionic soft-metal round in the chamber which ignites on impact.

As an aside, the Inferno X rounds produced by the Omega Collective have one of the better mod descriptions I have come across in my work: "The Inferno X package combines our highest-density thermionic block with a high-precision heat-tolerant pick, our fastest hole coater, and a high-compression evacuated well in order to achieve the most effective incendiary ammo mod on the market." In more accessible terms, this means the mod package includes:

A high-quality shaver which can tolerate the heat of the ammo block

A projectile coating mechanism in the loading chamber which can apply a thick coating even to projectiles of any size even in high rate-of-fire weapons

A barrel modification that evacuates the air in the barrel to decrease friction and material loss in the barrel, and uses weak mass effect fields to compress the coating so that it sticks more closely to the projectile as it flies

There interesting part here for a weapons designer is to pay attention to the heat balancing involved in this mod. Ammo shaving produces significantly more heat with thermionic blocks, but this is countered with a high-quality shaver as well as improved insulation of the block-shaver assembly. The coating mechanism in the chamber also increases heat production by quite a bit, as the reaction between the thermionic metal and the coating is extremely pyrogenic. The added mass effect manipulation functionality in the barrel also produces some more heat. Both effects, however, are precisely countered by the barrel evacuation function. In fact, the compression function is usually dynamically VI-adjusted to fully balance the heat generation. This is worth keeping in mind as a weapons designer, since your weapons are likely to be used with similar mods, meaning that you as a designer must put in the work to make sure that your weapon can handle them.

Finally, quick mention must be made of radioactive and toxic ammunition mods. They are universally banned across all of Council space, and their use is very much frowned upon even in the Terminus, though neither the ban nor the moral outrage has managed to stop them being used or even produced. Interestingly, there is _no ban_ on the production or possession of these munitions, only on their sale and use. The mods are simple enough; chemical rounds are simply the same loading chamber coating mechanisms used in inferno ammo where the coating is replaced with toxic chemicals, while different radioactive rounds have a polonium or other radioactive coating applied either via the same means or via laser-powder application.

 **Anti-barrier**

Anti-barrier munitions come in three main flavours: Protonic ammo, phasic ammo, and disruptive ammo. Disruptor ammunition is banned in Council space, a relatively recent and controversial ban which was instated presumably due to a series of high-profile instances of the disruptor mod shorting out the control circuits in weapons and causing them to fire on their own. Various firearms manufacturers are currently lobbying their respective governments to put pressure on the Council to have the ban overturned, arguing that these problems came about due to poor standards regulation of the ammo modding market rather than a problem with the mod type itself. It is generally assumed that the ban will be overturned within a couple of years at the most.

Phasic and protonic ammo both work in essentially the same fashion: Extremely precise ammo shavers shave off projectiles on the particulate matter scale creating a particle cloud, which is then condensed and charged in the loading chamber. Usually, the rails will be overcharged as well to compensate for the loss of mass, but even at twice the acceleration these particle bolts will cause less damage on impact than a regular round. However, because the projectile is a condensed particulate cloud, some portion of the particles will bypass kinetic barriers as the impact causes localised disruptions in the barrier field. Proton rounds are the most effective at this, as they are fired at higher velocities and are 'filtered' to strip electrons from the cloud, which is essentially the opposite of how phasic ammo works.

There is some experimental work on phasic ammo that is widely expected to completely supplant protonic ammunition in the coming years. The idea is that by combining current phasic ammo tech with a regular ammo shaver, you can produce a smaller projectile surrounded by a particulate cloud. A barrier impact with a round like that could theoretically overload shield generators as the particle cloud 'hides' the bullet until the moment it impacts the already-disrupted barrier. This would change the mechanic of phasic ammunition from barrier penetration to barrier destruction, but the idea is that these rounds wouldn't be made useless by even mediocre armour plating. Theoretically, the particle cloud would increase the damage of the projectile slightly even without barriers in the way, by weakening the surface before the full impact.

Disruptor ammo works on completely different principles, but achieves similar aims. A weapon enhanced with disruptor ammo applies a strong electric field the projectile either in the loading chamber, in the barrel, or both. On the higher end, specialised shavers will shave and charge the projectile in one go, usually shaving large projectiles that can hold more charge, with the VI adjusting projectile velocity down to compensate and avoid increasing heat generation.

On impact, a disruptor projectile dumps its charge into whatever medium it hits, which in the case of kinetic barriers means that the charge will arc along the pseudo-surface of the barrier until it reaches the generator, which it then damages directly. If the round hits an organic target, the target will be electrocuted, and synthetic targets will have their systems fried and scrambled. There is a rumour that part of the reason why disruptor ammo was banned was because Turian and Alliance drone defences are traditionally unshielded and are extremely vulnerable to disruptor ammunition. This problem is well known, and there is significant engineering effort being put into solving it.

 **Speciality ammunition**

This is a sort of 'catch-all' category, containing everything from high-force ammunition such as hammerhead rounds, to the trademarked Snowblind mods, high explosive ammunition, and cryo rounds. There are too many speciality ammunition variants to cover and get any use out of covering in a brief review book such as this one, but it would be useful to any aspiring gunsmith to know the most popular variants and their implications for the products they may be building in the future.

The most popular speciality ammunition, by a vast margin, is the hammerhead round. Only AP ammunition holds a larger market share, with the market share of the third most popular mod – incendiary ammunition – being a mere 60% that of the hammerhead. Mechanically speaking, high-impact munitions such as the hammerhead works on relatively simple, shared principles:

Larger projectiles

Softer metals

Projectiles shaped to flatten on impact

Standard hammerheads don't really impact with more force than regular rounds, but they focus the force over a larger area with less penetration, producing a greater 'push' on the target. Sledgehammer rounds are hammerheads fired at increased velocity, and are often coated with toxins to balance against the lack of penetration.

The second most common speciality ammunition is cryonic ammunition, or 'cryo rounds'. The cryo round is entirely a hole mod, meaning that it works solely through compressing standard shaved projectiles into Bose-Einstein condensates, super-cooled subatomic particle masses that draw heat from targets on impact. Specifically, the round disintegrates into a large particle cloud on impact, which then freezes anything caught in it. Cryo rounds do not normally penetrate targets, causing damage solely through intense cooling and shear forces (cracking and shattering). This kind of freezing causes material damage regardless of what the target is made of; synthetic materials have their physical properties momentarily changed upon freezing, and organic materials are damaged in a multitude of ways.

One type of cryonic ammunition that works in a slightly different way is the trademarked Snowblind round, manufactured and distributed solely by the company Snowblind Munitions, based on a Volus colony in the inner Traverse. The differentiator for Snowblind is that weapons modified with this ammunition maintain the snap-freezing function of cryo rounds, while maintaining penetrative force. They do this by swapping the ammo block with a metamaterial block designed for _segmental collapse_ , which means that only the 'shell' of the round collapses into condensate, maintaining a core penetrating projectile. For the system to work, the shaver must operate more slowly and precisely than standard, and the cooling laser system needs to operate at a higher level of precision as well. This causes a significant decrease to the rate of fire of any weapon modified with this type of ammo, but many consider this effect to be balanced by the significant potential bonus to damage output.

Perhaps the most infamous speciality ammunition on the market, high-explosive rounds are banned entirely in Council space, but remain highly popular in the Terminus markets. One would think that HE rounds would be the most 'brutally simplistic' ammo mod out there, but in truth it is one of the most complex and sophisticated ammo mods available. Without precise engineering, HE ammo would be more likely to blow up your own weapon than your target. First, there is the chemical and material science challenge involved in crafting the optimal high-explosive material for the ammo block, which should be stable while inert, when shaved, when loaded, and when fired, and only explode upon impact. With the limited projectile sizes and ridiculous velocities involved in mass effect weapons engineering, this is no easy task and much clever engineering has gone into making it all work.

To begin with, _all_ HE ammo blocks are metamaterial cells structures, each cell containing an incompressible explosive component. The walls of each cell is made from a material which is non-reactive with the material it contains, but becomes highly reactive when deformed and exposed to gases trapped in the similarly structured hard shell coating which separates each cell from each other. This coating is a semi-sticky powder, which wears off from friction. When this happens, the surface of the projectile-cell ignites. This is part of the reason for the extreme heat generated by firing a HE round, combined with the fact that HE-modded guns replace the shaver with a more precise 'picker' mechanism which deconstructs the HE ammo block cell-by-cell. At every step in the normal firing process, the powder coating ignites and generates heat. Normally, HE rounds are fired at significantly slower velocity compared to regular ammo, though this is more than compensated for by the larger projectile-cell, and with the knowledge that velocity couldn't be lowered enough to fully compensate for the heat generation without significantly impacting the performance of the weapon, most modders only adjust projectile velocity enough to avoid irreparably damaging the weapon.

Upon impact, the projectile cell collapses and breaks apart, functioning at first similarly to a hammerhead round. Then, the various compounds making up the cell and its contents react violently and explode. The majority of the damage from HE ammo comes from the force and heat of the explosion, though some penetrative damage may occur from projectile shrapnel.

 **The lesson**

These mods are mostly useful to know about to gunsmiths because they provide case studies in how the products you make are probably going to be used in ways you never designed or planned for. This is a thought that's generally important to keep in mind for any product engineer in any field, but the extreme forces involved in arms engineering means that the potential fallout of engineering failure makes this a paramount concern. If your sniper rifle's barrel assembly violently rips itself apart from the continued stress of high-explosive rounds fired over scram rails on the 100th shot, that's on you. That's a customer you have killed, not through shoddy engineering, but through _naive_ engineering.

As a rule of thumb, every weapon you make should be made with material tolerances that go far beyond worst-case scenarios with twice the force input on each component. There are historical horror stories that show how ignoring such rules can lead to your downfall, the most prominent perhaps being that of the private arms manufacturer Senic Clan Arms. The volus who ran the company ran it on a philosophy of mass-market accessibility, which meant keeping costs low while keeping 'quality' high. Quality, in their terms, meant quality of finish and mechanical performance. About five years in, SCA had established themselves as one of the premier consumer market arms manufacturers in Council space. And then the excrement entered the ventilation system.

DeGenis, A private military contractor operating on trade routes between the Traverse and inner Council space had entered into a deal that saw SCA as their primary arms supplier. Two years into the deal, the trouble began with some weapons violently breaking down in combat. DeGenis suffered significant losses, culminating with a whole company lost as an anti-materiel sniper rifle blew up when it was fired from a bunker, the blowback killing everyone inside. The PMC sued, a public relations nightmare followed for SCA, and within a year the company was bankrupted and the owners arrested by C-Sec on multiple fraud and manslaughter charges. The fact that SCA weapons were Council Standards compliant did not protect them, in fact it made them liable for fraud charges as they were judged to have mislead regulators on material capabilities claims. The fact that the reason the weapons failed was particular combinations of 3rd party modifications was also seen as irrelevant, since C-Sec considered such modification covered by the _expected use of product_ clauses.

The lesson? Know what mods are out there, both ammo mods and weapon mods, map your worst cases, and then add tolerances to _that_ before you finalise your design. The only acceptable exception to this practice is the bespoke weaponry market, where you will generally have specific tolerances specified before you even get to work.

* * *

...

A/N: I do not own the Mass Effect.

So, the formatting may be a bit messed up on this one. Hopefully it's not too hard to read. Although, ammo mods is perhaps the biggest mess in the ME-verse, so I've had to bend my mind at some unnatural angles to make this work at all. Hopefully you guys picked up on my setting the stage for the disappearance and/or change of some of these ammo types throughout the three games...


	4. Weapon modifications: The basics

In the second chapter, we covered the basics of mod markets and practices in Council space and the Terminus. In this chapter, we will look at weapon modifications in terms of their mechanics, how they are different from ammo modifications, and what broad differences one can expect to find between the different markets.

Weapon mods are significantly harder to classify than ammo mods. Where all ammo modifications operate in some way on the weapon's projectile, even if this is done through modifications to the weapon itself, weapon modifications vary so widely in functionality, implementation, and operation that broad categorisation is all but impossible. Most designers and retailers hide this complexity behind customer-friendly product names, especially in Council space, though various standardisation efforts have made many weapon mods very simple to install. Many mods fit onto standardised attachment rails, most notably optics and sensor mods. Additionally, many weapon mods are pure software, consisting of no more than changes to the onboard control VIs.

Finally, it is worth repeating that mods in Council space and mods in the Terminus are often very different. The Council rank model has led to the establishment of a standardised framework for modifications, ensuring that most modifications on the market can be used for any weapon. This is not the case in the Terminus, where the utter lack of standardisation means that mods have to be customised specifically for the weapon, by which I mean the _individual weapon_ and not its class. Most Terminus mod retailers keep mods constructed for every common weapon platform and modify them for the buyer's weapons upon purchase. Bespoke modifications are also quite common in the Terminus, though that market has a rather high cost of entry outside of your standard hack-jobs.

 **Universal plug-and-play modifications**

There are very few weapon mods that can be said to be universally compatible with any and all weapons apart from highly customised weapons. However, even though they are few, they still account for a sizeable portion of the mods market. This is because these mods are generally low cost compared to other mods that require adaptation, easy to install even for the layman, and quite useful across purposes.

The most common mods of this class belongs to the Optics category, usually in the form of detachable scopes that can function either as stand-alone optics using standard attachment rails (which usually require custom fitting in the Terminus), or as scope extenders for weapons that already have scopes. There are different models with different advantages, from the most basic simple optic to optics systems including stabiliser gyros and recoil suppressors, auto-tagging, HUD-links, spectral modifiers such as thermal and terahertz overlays, and integrated combat sensors, though stability and recoil upgrades are not commonly integrated in Council market upgrades due to challenges relating to the rank model.

Common to all these additional features, however, is that all their functionality is contained within the mod itself, requiring only a single interface to the weapon it modifies. This interface is usually quite simple, most commonly a standard rail attachment. Scope extenders obviously also come with adaptable interfaces to seamlessly integrate with existing scopes, but this is usually a simple enough matter since the primary interface for a scope tends to be fairly simple: Eyes don't really change that much between species, mechanically speaking, and for those species that do have particular requirements – Volus and Quarians, primarily – convention already exist to adapt on the user's side, for example by HUD-links, selective visor occlusion technologies, and even the simple rubber eyepiece

Other mods in this segment are generally attachment modifications as well, such as various grips, laser sights, lights, combat sensors, and so on. A significant market exists for 'exotic' weapon attachments such as secondary weapons (underbarrel tech launchers, micro shotguns), flashers, and various special purpose laser attachments, though apart from underbarrel tech launchers these are mostly ignored by the professional markets. One exception is the underbarrel omni-forge attachment, essentially a modern-day detractable bayonet system. However, it should be noted that most mods that change the weapon's frame envelope tend to be shunned in the professional market in Council space, as they are seen as making the weapon frame non-standard.

 **Power upgrades**

This is where things get nebulous. A power upgrade should, theoretically, be any upgrade that directly increases the damage output per shot, but that's not how it works in reality. For example, frictionless material modifications tend to result in such increases, but that's not the primary purpose of these mods. Some, then, tend to refer to power upgrades as barrel upgrades, but that makes them hard to distinguish from specialty upgrades such as shear field muzzles. Though generally, most people understand this category to consist mainly of three types of mod:

High calibre barrels, which isn't technically a barrel upgrade but rather a shaver upgrade with an accompanying adjustment to the rails to accommodate the larger projectiles. Rail extensions, a somewhat self-explanatory rail attachment, And finally scram rails, which is a complete rail replacement that is illegal in Council space without a permit.

Of these, scram rails are the most interesting, as the other two are simple and straightforward modifications which usually just involves scavenging spare parts from other weapons and fitting them. A scram rail operates on slightly different principles to a regular accelerator rail. Where an accelerator rail 'pulls' the projectile forward bit by bit throughout the length of the barrel, a scram rail utilises something called a magnetic pressure cascade effect. The magic starts in the loading chamber, where the projectile is locked into a magnetic cavity which restricts to the surface of the actual projectile. This causes the projectile to experience extreme repulsion from the magnetic rails which in a scram rail system extend into the loading chamber itself. Once aligned with the centre of the barrel, the magnetic field _behind_ the projectile is strengthened, causing the projectile to move forward on a magnetic pressure wave. As it reaches the barrel, this wave deactivates the first segment of the rails, accelerating the projectile and the wave forward. This effect cascades through the barrel, generating a _push_ effect on the projectile and accelerating it to a significant velocity increase that does not linearly translate into added damage, or indeed _any_ added penetration power, because the rail also 'crunches' the projectile. Obviously, scram rails do not play well with shaped projectiles, though when properly calibrated the crunching can be minimised if the projectile is large enough, and shaped ammo mods tend to produce larger grains.

It's worth mentioning that there exists technically a 'fourth path' modification in this category: The hyper rail upgrade. Hyper rails are essentially a combination of an extended rail attachment, a high-calibre barrel modification, and a combination of added and overclocked mass accelerator rails. As a result, you get larger projectiles fired at vastly increased velocities, producing extreme additional damage and force. The cost is a massive increase to heat generation, significant enough that no internal heat sink system exists that can effectively handle the amount of heat without breaking down, and a dramatic increase in recoil. This makes the mod a very poor fit for automatic weapons, generally a poor fit for small arms, and very much a mod for the specialist. Due to a well-documented history of fatal accidents resulting from modification failures, hyper rail modifications are explicitly banned in Council space, and they are generally not used in the Terminus either beyond anti-materiel specialist fire teams.

 **Heat management upgrades**

As heat is the primary limiter in mass effect weaponry, one would expect there to be many different ways of handling heat. Perhaps surprisingly, this isn't really the case. Most solutions tend to be systemic, variations on how heat is handled within the weapon, and this makes it difficult to categorise these as individual products. Such solutions tend to either be part of the initial weapon design phase, or be applied as aftermarket modification services. These don't qualify as mods, in the product sense, because they are irreversible. However, three main classes of product-based cooling mods exist on the market today: Heat sink upgrades, frictionless materials upgrades, and heat shunt upgrades.

Heat sink upgrades are simple enough: As mentioned previously, they are poorly named heat _vents_ , and do not actually modify the function of the existing internal heat sinks. Heat sink mods simply improves the efficiency of the dumping of heat from the heat sink, which is a path with limited potential.

Frictionless materials upgrades are far more diverse, and also far more effective. While the most common variants are simple barrel and chamber inserts or coatings, which work by reducing _heat drag_ caused by air combusted by the accelerating projectile, higher-end usually replace the full component. The benefit of this is that replacements are less prone to damage than coatings and inserts, allowing higher tolerances and therefore better performance. Additionally, some mods in this category create a functionally distinct weapon: Evacuation barrels, barrel replacements that evacuates all air from the barrel and chamber before firing, are considered frictionless material upgrades since they technically improve weapon performance by reducing internal friction.

Finally, heat shunt upgrades are very rare indeed in Council space, but fairly common in the Terminus. The reason for this is not one of regulation, technically, but one of practicality; heat shunts are fairly complex to install, and do not fit very well with the standardised frameworks of Council market weaponry. A heat shunt upgrade to a Council weapon might break all compatibility with other standardised modifications and upgrades. In the Terminus it is much more common, and even expected, to customise your weapons well beyond its standards, and therefore the heat shunt is as relevant a modification as any other. The heat shunt works on a fairly simple principle; provide an alternative path for heat dispersal. The best existing heat shunt mods on Omegas markets today offer up to a 37% increase in heat capacity by completely offloading the dumping of heat production for every third shot fired through a secondary venting system which bypasses the primary heat sinks almost entirely. The reason you get more than 33% out of it is that the act of offloading the heat handling itself allows the primary heat sink to recover slightly every time.

 **Stabilisation mods**

A broad and common category of mods, the most common stabilisation mods are various aftermarket grip and gyro attachments, though these see fairly little use in the professional markets as stability damper upgrades are significantly more effective and – at least in Council space – keeping weapon frames standardised is seen as important. In the Terminus, both categories are common, but since very little expertise is required for the production and installation of grips and gyro attachments, gunsmiths rarely have to concern themselves with them as most customers prefer to forge and install these themselves.

Stability dampers, then, are the most common type of mod you'll have to contend with as a designer. These are fairly simple systems, but their installation is rather complex as they have to be precisely aligned and connected with the weapon's firing and accelerator mechanisms. Most stability dampers are installed in the weapon's handle, with its mechanism connected throughout the weapon and the weights system aligned in parallel with the barrel. Some high-end dampers are significantly more complex, incorporating a separate mass effect core and utilising mass effect fields rather than kinetic counterforce to counter recoil forces. Very rarely will you see gyro stabiliser in these mods, as professionals tend to dislike the 'sluggishness' they usually introduce to precision aiming and weapon movement in general.

Another type of stabilisation mod, which is highly rated by combat specialists but is as rare as it is expensive, is the so-called 'Concentration Mod'. This is a package mod consisting of a set of biometric sensors, target-assistance software, and a dynamic micro-gyro stabilisation system, as well as a micro-injection stim package, all controlled by a separate VI which functions both to offload the onboard weapon VI but also to coordinate with it. The mod adjusts weapon firing and stabilisation to the user's pulse and breathing, increases the user's reflexes and perception rate temporarily when engaged, and ensures precise target alignment when firing (counteracting micro-motions from pulling the trigger). This mod is strictly illegal in Council space, and unless you are a Spectre you cannot get a license for it. Which is probably for the best, since the stims they rely on tend to be rather harmful to all species apart from Krogan and Vorcha, for which they have no effect to begin with.

 **Specialisation mods**

Not to be confused with specialty mods, these are modifications that 'specialise' the weapon's function in a particular aspect, such as increasing projectile penetration independent of ammo modifications, or smart chokes for shotguns that dynamically adjust pellet spread for maximum accuracy on target.

Piercing mods and smart chokes are by far the most common specialisation mods. Of the two, the piercing mod is the simplest; it replaces the loading chamber of the weapon to precisely align the projectile for optimised penetration profile before it enters the barrel, and provides it with a boost so that it fires at increased velocity. The alignment process is shape-agnostic, meaning that it dynamically measures the shape of each grain and includes it in the calculations. This is how you can get the 'double bonus' from piercing mods and AP ammo; the ammo mod shapes the grain and increases velocity through the barrel, whereas the piercing mod improves the projectile's pre-entry alignment and further increases its acceleration. In fact, it is possible to get a triple bonus with some types of barrel extensions, specifically high-velocity barrels, though these barrel extensions are expensive, rare, and banned in Council space under the rank model.

 **Specialty mods**

Again, we round off the categories with a catch-all; specialty mods are weapon mods that add unintended functionality to a weapon. Or, stated differently, specialty mods are mods that don't fit into the other categories…

A prominent example of this is are the various capacitor mods that don't adjust the functionality of the weapon as much as they improve its wielder. These are generally rare and very expensive, and belong to a very narrow market, but attachments such as the infamous Power Magnifier attachment are still sought-after by wealthy individuals with particular needs. Rumour has it that Asari Commando squads nearly always modify their weapons with such attachments. The shadow market here is likely big enough to warrant a brief view of the mechanics involved, even though these modifications are not technically relevant to _gunsmithing_.

The Power Magnifier is, presumably, an Asari invention. It consists of an eezo core, an eezo conduit plug, a set of static charge capacitors, and control circuits. The weapon's wielder connects the PM to their combat harness, which in turn connects to the wielder's amp. The connection synchronises the wielder's biotic field with the eezo core in the PM, providing a significant power boost both by increasing the amount of available to the amp and by acting as an external eezo node for the biotic. Reportedly, this comes at the cost of greater strain to the body, and there are studies suggesting that prolonged use of PMs are associated with some strains of what has become known in Alliance medical parlance as Biotic Parkinsons, a disease caused by long-term sustained neural damage from biotic fields.

PMs can also be used by non-biotics, as the eezo core and extra capacitors, and the simple plug-in functionality, means they can provide additional power and functionality to omni-forges and tech launchers.

* * *

...

 **Author's notes: I do not own Mass Effect.**

Writing this stuff somehow makes it easier for me to write documentation at work. I guess that's a good thing? I mean, that *is* part of my job, after all...

So yeah, weapon mods are generally nearly as problematic as ammo mods. Still, I think I've managed to make sense of them, at least a little bit. It's a bit of a short chapter, really, but as I'd already covered the most basic stuff between the 3rd party mods section of chapter 2 and the previous chapter, there wasn't much more to fill than the specific mechanisms of the various mods you see throughout the ME run. Hope you enjoy!


	5. Bespoke weapon systems

For most of you aspiring gunsmiths, this is the chapter you have been waiting for. Where the previous chapters have been primers on existing weaponry and the basic mechanics of those weapons, mods, and ammunition mods, as well as some regulatory and market primers, most gunsmiths get into the business out of a desire to craft _new_ weapons, to design _new tech_. However, it is necessary to point out that nearly all qualified gunsmiths end up working either in retail or repair shops or in the design or production departments of established arms manufacturers. Very, very few of us are privileged enough to be able to build the kind of reputation and skill needed to survive as gunsmiths-for-hire, producing bespoke and customised weaponry from customer specifications.

In Council space, barely a hundred gunsmiths operate within this space, and on the Citadel itself that number is down to half a dozen as I write this. The last master gunsmith to successfully establish herself in the hub of galactic power was the human weapons engineer Sandra Levi. She established her shop on the Zakera Wards just one year after the First Contact War, riding a wave of interest in human weapons design following the Alliance's surprisingly successful engagements with the Turian military during that conflict. The Levi Arms shop survived on the Citadel until the proprietor, Levi herself, succumbed to illness at a relatively young age of 64. That was 10 years ago, and no new Masters have managed to establish themselves on the station, despite several trying.

And if knowing just how tiny the eye of this needle is to thread wasn't enough to put you off this line of work, know that this chapter may do the trick. Because it is when you start discussing this market segment that it becomes abundantly clear what it is you are creating as a gunsmith: Tailored killing machines.

Many gunsmiths prefer to ignore this aspect of their job, suggesting that they are merely building a product and it is not their business what those products are later used for. However, this feeble excuse largely serves only to lighten the load on the mind of those gunsmiths who cannot cope with the realities of the profession. Certainly, if you work in a factory where you produce or design a product to standardised specs dictated by your bosses and the politicians who make the laws, then you can pat yourself on the back for a job well done as long as the product is made. Not so much when you are creating bespoke weaponry.

Even if the customer isn't forthright about what the weapon will be used for, it is very rarely difficult to guess. For example, a customer won't ask for a shear field muzzle if they are going to be using the weapon for trophy hunting; the resulting impact would ruin the trophy, and the only game with reinforced skulls would more effectively be killed with high-penetration rounds. Nor are ultra-compact pistol frame shotguns useful for any legitimate purposes. But that dances around the core of the issue: Most customers won't come to you asking for specific technical capabilities, but for specific _results_. They won't ask for the shear field muzzle, they'll ask for a weapon that fires projectiles which does maximum damage to the contents of a skull. They won't ask for an ultra-compact pistol frame shotgun, they will ask for a weapon that is easily concealed, deals massive damage to unshielded targets that can't be mitigated with medi-gel, and is most effective up close.

For many, this highlights ethical problems that they simply can't get past. So, for them, this is the type of work that sees them abandon the field. I have known many talented young engineers who left their apprenticeships after just a few such interactions with customers. Though I cannot fault them for making a moral choice here – whether I agree with it or not – it does represent a waste of resources in terms of their training and mentorship up until that point, so I feel obligated to make this point here:

If you are not comfortable with the realities of this line of work, or are unable to find justifications that enable you to feel comfortable with it, then gunsmithing is _not for you_. Because if you think you can do this job without understanding the ramifications of your work – that your work _will_ be used for _murder_ – then you will find your product lacking. You must know the purpose of your product before you make it.

All that out of the way, let us start by outlining the basic market in bespoke weaponry. At the most fundamental level, you have two market segments accounting for over 90% of business: The 'collector' market, and the professional market. When we talk about the collector market, we are using a euphemism: This market largely consists of rich people with more money than sense, who are looking for weapons no one else has just because they _can_. These are the rich businesspeople who want a handgun that matches their outfit, the rich heir who's having a frame armour built for him and wants 'cool weapons that pop out of it', the career politician who is just that little bit paranoid and thinks they need a concealed handgun for protection. Make no mistake, the collector market is the bread and butter of our business. While it accounts for less than a quarter of all product by volume, it more than makes up for it in terms of revenue, with collectors willing and able to buy their products at a premium (and in some cases demanding it!).

On the other hand, the professional market is where you build your reputation. These customers can be bounty hunters, assassins, mercenaries, special forces soldiers, and Spectres, and they share two commonalities: They are all professional murderers, and they are all _very_ particular about the tools of their trade. If a customer in this segment ends up unhappy with your work, that customer will spread the word and this could ultimately destroy your career. Now, the professional market in the Terminus is significantly more tolerant, but it is also more difficult to get into. There, most professionals get their weapons and equipment through their networks, whether it be their PMC, their current employer, their professional association, etc.

For gunsmiths, this means that there are two routes to establishing yourself in the Terminus. You either join one of the aforementioned organisations, or you start small on a stable warlord-controlled world and build your way up by getting noticed. The latter is the hardest route, but also the one with the greatest potential reward. If you tie yourself to a single organisation, you are limited by that organisation pretty much for life, especially in the Terminus where warlords are loathe to allow their enemies to reap the benefits you are currently giving them. Which is not to say that this isn't a desirable path; going it alone is significantly more dangerous, as the various powers of the Terminus are _always_ looking for an edge, and regularly engage in 'forceful acquisition' of talented assets.

 **The UC**

To give you a sense of the kind of weapons you may be tasked with constructing, it is helpful to have a look at some case studies. To begin with, let's look at a type of weapon that is very commonly requested both in Citadel space and in the Terminus: The ultra-compact handgun (UC).

On the face of it, this type of weapon is simply a practicality. Compact guns are easier to carry and easier to conceal, which should be advantageous for people who want to protect themselves. However, that market is well defined within the standard space of mass produced weapons, with cheap and sufficient weapons widely available throughout the galaxy. No, the ultra-compact handgun is a different beast. Their basic feature is, invariably, concealment. These are weapons that are meant to be brought where weapons are either not permitted or not expected.

The most common UC you might be asked to build is the disposable frame. This is a gun which is made not only to be easily concealed, but to be easily – and often automatically – destroyed after use. A favourite of assassins across the galaxy, the weapon is often fired just once or twice before going into a meltdown which renders it useless, untraceable, and unrecognisable. This is done in a few different ways, though the most popular is also the simplest: The weapon is created without an internal heatsink assembly and without self-repairing materials, causing the weapon to literally melt from the inside. How quick this process is depends on the tuning of the weapon, which in turn depends on the customer's specifications which will usually specify the exact number of rounds the weapon should be capable of firing within a given time frame before melting down. A variation on this theme is to incorporate a heat sink which will overload and trigger the meltdown if the weapon is fire enough times within a given time frame, for example three rounds within two seconds.

The alternative is the disintegration method, which is either accomplished by using metamaterials that completely disassemble when heated to a certain point or by building a weapon that will violently explode upon overheating. All of these methods are popular, though the metamaterial triggered disassembly method is the most thorough and also by far the most expensive.

I once built a UC for a customer on Illium, which was rated at an output twice that of any mass produced sniper rifle, that would immediately disassemble into charred dust upon firing. Since it was specified in the order that it should only fire a single projectile, I designed the gun without the normal ammo block / shaver assembly and with a liquid micro-channel heatsink that distributed the heat evenly throughout the weapon. The heat would trigger both disassembly and the subsequent incineration of the metamaterial cells once the weapon was fired. The gun held a single caseless round, about five times the size of a regular heavy round, in a loading chamber reminiscent of a miniaturised version of an old chemically propelled handgun mechanism. Accuracy was specifically stated not to be important, suggesting that the weapon was meant to be used up-close, so the gun was fitted with eight oversized scram rails completely surrounding a barrel twice the width of a regular heavy pistol.

The weapon was, in a word, bonkers. No gunsmith in his right mind would ever come up with a weapon like it, unless specifically told to make it. It was made to destroy itself, it was made to be wildly inaccurate, it was made to dangerously exceed the specifications of any handgun frame. And it worked perfectly.

About a month after the order was completed, one of the sitting members of Illium's Board of Directors was assassinated with that weapon. The assassin had blended into a crowd of protesters outside the Nos Astra location where the Board was having a meeting, fired the gun from close range as the crowd burst the barricades, and then disappeared. The crowd and the general chaos meant that even on video footage it was impossible to determine who had fired the weapon, or even where the weapon had been fired from. No trace of it was ever found.

This is a story I would normally never tell, as the privacy of my customers is protected both by law and my ethics. However, in this case my customer had come forward immediately to proclaim her innocence. This customer was a Proxy, a bespoke weapons reseller who works as an intermediary between the recipient of the weapon and the gunsmith. Proxies exist for several types of affairs, perhaps the most infamous being the Messenger, who – as the name implies – runs a galactic messaging service for sensitive information, _symbolic messages_ (also known as assassinations), and physical packages. Proxies, particularly weapons proxies, specialise in anonymity, and in this case the Proxy never knew the identity of the person who had ordered the weapon from me.

The reason the Proxy went public was twofold: First, it was likely that she would be tracked down as a buyer of a weapon matching the specifications of the one used in the assassination. Illium intelligence is, after all, _very_ good at their jobs, especially when their job affects the safety of their Board of Directors. Second, going public like that served as good PR. She knew there was no way to trace her transactions with the assassin. She knew she could not be legally punished for her involvement, as her actions were all entirely within the limits of the law. She knew this, and she knew these facts would get media attention, which would in turn mean more business for her. Judging from the uptick in business I received through her after the media spectacle, her prediction held true.

 **The Tech Gun**

Another common custom product is a weapon that marries tech launchers with a gun frame. Most commonly, the frames used for this type of weapon are shotgun and light machinegun frames. The Tech Gun should not be confused for the nearly-utopian idea of weapons that fabricate specialised munitions in a projectile envelope, as mentioned in the first chapter of this book. Tech guns fire tech mines using rails, giving them a faster and flatter trajectory and more intuitive firing mechanism, but they do not fire tech _projectiles_. That is a wholly different and wildly difficult challenge, and one that I would love to solve some day.

The choice between a shotgun and a machinegun frame for the tech gun normally comes down to a question of space; how large should the tech mines launched by the weapon be, and how quickly should the weapon be able to fire them? This is a question of space because the only way to size up the mines and increase the launch frequency is to increase the size available to the fabricator and the mine clip.

One of the most terrifying weapons I've ever constructed was an LMG-frame tech gun. The basis for the design was a Revenant frame, stripped down and with a second full barrel added in place of the waste ejection barrel. The gun came with two large clips, one for Overload mines and the other for Incinerate mines. While the mines were pretty standard, which is fairly uncommon for tech gun designs, the overall weapon turned out to be rather terrifying. It pumped out alternate Overloads and Incinerates at a rate of three per second, which was enough to sustain a continuous series of secondary tech detonations on the targets.

The weapon was made for crowd control, specifically to be used against a Vorcha infestation on the lower levels of Nos Astra. While Overloads are ordinarily used to deplete your target's shields, here the idea was simply to arrest momentum, to cause hordes of targets to pile up. The Incinerates did the rest. I made three of these weapons, and they were effective enough that I-Sec requested the schematics for mass production. I refused the request, and to this day I have never made another. Creating a few to handle a vermin problem is one thing; the only purpose of mass production would be to use the weapon against the populace to quell protests. One might think that an oddly moral choice to make for a gunsmith, but the fact is that said populace contained 95% of my customers on Illium. It would have been a bad piece of business.

Now, before you go about trying to recreate such a weapon, realise the significant engineering challenges involved in its creation. Timing and synchronisation of dual omni-forges is not a trivial matter, especially not within a weapon frame small enough to be wielded by a single person. The firing cycle is also very complicated, with asymmetric barrels and rails that are shielded from each other. Incinerate and Overload mines are differently shaped, which means that the rails and the barrels require different adaptations. Additionally, they must still be synchronised with each other to avoid interference from firing, and synchronised with the omni-forges to avoid jams in the firing pipeline. Additionally, you are limited to using only a single loader for both clips, which requires a bespoke VI to handle the required dynamic timing. Suffice it to say, it is a very, very complicated engineering project to undertake.

And I also own the patent, so undertaking it is a good way to get sued.

 **The Mounted Gun**

Another very common bespoke weapon type is the mounted gun, essentially any weapon made to be fired from a mount or hardpoint rather than being held in the user's hands. This is a broad category, including such weapons as vehicle-mounted machine guns, but also more exotic weaponry such as frame armour arm-mounted weapons.

Building weapons of this type can be both freeing and severely limiting at once, which is a statement best understood by example. In one of my more recent projects, the Close Corporation acquired the rights to an old Alliance frame armour design, the T5 model armour. Most of the development we have done on this project are, and will remain, highly classified industry secrets, but one particular addition is interesting enough to be revealed here. That addition is the Multi-Frag system.

Normally, a short-range grenade launcher wouldn't qualify as a 'mounted gun'. However, the Multi-Frag is different on several accounts. First of all, it is not designed as a grenade launcher, but rather as a detached barrel-feed system. The weapon consists of a series of barrel-and-rail assemblies on the forearm of the frame armour, which connects to a feeding tube system that carries projectiles from the fabricator part of the system, mounted on the back and shoulder of the armour.

Not everyone is aware that grenades can be field fabricated using, essentially, omni-tools. The reason this isn't common knowledge is that it isn't commonly done, though this is because grenades are too large for most omni-tools to fabricate them effectively and store them afterwards. However, many grenade designs come in compressible envelopes to allow them to be stored more easily. These designs usually compress down to tech mine size, which makes them compatible with mounted tech launcher systems that use feeder tubes between the clips and the launchers. The way the system works for the wearer of the armour is that they are equipped with small grenade launchers on their wrist which launch grenades fed into them through tubes internal to the armour from a clip by their shoulder, which in turn is slowly filled by an advanced omni-forge on the wearer's back. The entire system is internal, and on use the launcher fires anywhere from three to five grenades in a low arc. The number of grenades fired depends on the number of barrels and feeder lines fitted.

This weapon concept was freeing to work on, because it allowed me to step outside of the ordinary weapon frame envelope space I work within. However, it was also severely limiting because of all the other restrictions involved; the size of the grenades, the placement of the feeds and the forge, connecting to power and the frame armour's mass effect core, making sure the armour's computers could handle the weapon's firing cycle without interference effects on other systems. That's the kind of added challenges you can always expect from mounted gun projects: You are no longer working with a discrete weapon system, but an _integrated_ weapon system, which dramatically increases the potential complexity of the job.

The _most_ complex of these also happens to be one of the more common ones; the prosthetic weapon. There is no shortage of amputees in the galaxy, and not everyone can afford a cloned limb. As a result, prosthetics are _everywhere_ , and very often those who need them are current or former soldiers or mercenaries. This is a crowd that generally dislikes being unarmed – no pun intended – and they often seek out ways of arming themselves permanently. Usually, these jobs are fairly simple centre-mounted simple mass accelerators of the literal point-and-shoot variety, though sometimes you get more complex requests such as deployable 'bracelet'-type integrated weapons. But even for the simplest of variants of prosthetic armaments, there are many challenges. No two prosthetics are identical, they are all tailored to their user in terms of the mount, the neural connectors, and sensory systems. Some prosthetics come with integrated omni-tools, some do not. Some are modular prosthetics, where the arm and the hand are two discrete and changeable components. Prosthetic weaponry projects are invariably difficult, and therefore invariably costly to the customer.

 **Summary**

Most gunsmiths spend their entire careers working exclusively with existing lines of weapons, doing maintenance, assembly, and modification work on them. A minority gets to design their own weapons from scratch, and an even smaller minority makes a living from this sort of work.

Bespoke weapons design can be a lucrative business for the most talented and best-connected of us, but most freelance weapons designers barely scrape by on work that is very complicated, extremely laborious, and ethically difficult. It is the dream of most in the industry, but it is one that is usually very quickly dismissed once the young gunsmith understands the realities of the galaxy. Still, the title of Master Gunsmith is traditionally only given to those who have gained a certain reputation within this particular segment, and as such the work is still held in particularly high esteem within the profession.

* * *

...

 **Author's note: I do not own Mass Effect.**

This chapter is a bit different, more of a point-of-view disjointed story format than the more tech-manual-y approach of the previous chapters. I felt it was needed, because it's an obvious hole in such a book, and it gave me the opportunity to give you some glimpses into Aaron Close's (public) past.

The next chapter will focus on defensive technologies, such as armour, shielding, etc. There will also be chapters on frame armour, omni-tools, and grenades before the case study chapters begin. The first case study will probably be the Kishock.


	6. Kinetic barriers

Few technologies are as poorly understood by the layman as the humble kinetic barrier. In part, that is because the technology is anything but humble, and anything but simple. In part, it's because it is not just one technology. And it is also in part because the differences between how people think shields work, and how they actually work, are largely irrelevant to your average civilian.

But gunsmiths are not your average civilians. Many of us manufacture kinetic barriers for our customers, often to rather difficult specifications, but _all_ of us need to understand the complexities of kinetic barrier technologies in order to design and build weapons that must be able to effectively defeat them. This chapter will give you a primer on some of the most important aspects of kinetic barrier technologies, their strengths and weaknesses, and some notes on the market for these technologies. The latter is important not just for those who may want to specialise in defensive technologies, but also for those of us who want to design weapons aimed specifically at defeating the most common barriers in our most relevant markets.

 **The basics**

Contrary to popular belief, kinetic barriers do _not_ deflect bullets. At least, that is not what they are designed to do. Out of the entire breadth of kinetic barrier implementations – I have personally come across dozens of different approaches to the same concept – only _one_ that I am aware of actually deflects bullets, and it does not exist for personal use. This is the cyclonic barrier, an ingenious Quarian ship-based barrier system that utilises a multicore shielding system to effectively _spin_ the barrier rapidly, giving it a deflective effect. Cyclonic barriers are very effective, though their mechanics are poorly understood outside the Migrant Fleet – I could not explain their functioning to you if I tried – and as far as we can tell it only works for ships classed as light cruisers or lighter, though we do not know if that is due to technological limitations or resource limitations within the Fleet.

Other barriers, though, operate on entirely different principles: Counter-force and force dissipation. Physically speaking, from the bullet's perspective hitting a shield is the same as hitting an impenetrable, unyielding wall. What actually happens is that the moment the bullet enters the mass effect field, the force of the bullet interacts with the field such that the field 'hardens' instantaneously. The effect dissipates as soon as it appears, but at the moment of impact it _always_ counters an incoming projectile with the exact impact force of the projectile, effectively stopping it.

The important thing to remember for a weapons designer is that every impact on a kinetic barrier damages the barrier's emitters. Damage varies some with the force of the impact, but two successive hits with force F will always damage the emitter significantly more than one hit with force F*2. Put simply: Rapid fire impacts are the most effective way to break shields, physically speaking. The reason for this is quite simply that every impact 'pulls and pushes' on the field as emitted, and follow-up hits will then _further_ push on the field, taking it more and more out of range and increasing damage. There is a physical limit to how far the field can be pushed out of range, once that is reached the barrier field itself will _buckle_ upon impact. This does not further damage the barrier, unless the buckling is beyond a certain threshold directly proportional to the impact force. This is the reason why sufficiently powerful weapons are able to effectively 'break' the so-called _shield gate_ to penetrate the barrier and hit the target with one shot.

Speaking of the shield gate, it is a very important mechanic to understand, and key to some of the most misunderstood parts of kinetic barrier technology. For starters, shield capacitor size does _not_ determine the strength of the shield, but rather the shield's _capacity for self-repair and recovery_. The actual kinetic barrier does not draw very much power at all, and is more than capable of running on a simple omni-tool power cell. In fact, this is what civilian environmental barriers do, since rain and other environmental impacts normally have insufficient force to damage the emitters. In combat-ready shields, the systems that draw power are the emitter balancing, self-repair, and recovery – also called _bounce_ – procedures. Emitter balancing – sometimes misleadingly referred to as emitter switching – is the process of balancing the load in the different emitters to reduce the strain on those that are most damaged. Self-repair is fairly self-explanatory, referring to the systems that continuously repair the damage the emitters suffer from impacts. Finally, recovery is a procedure for temporarily over-charging the emitters, which has the effect of 'pulling' the barrier back within the emitter's tolerance range when an impact has pushed it out of it.

So, there are two types of shield failure: Plain failure, and shattering. Failure is the result of complete drain of the shield capacitors, which have to be repaired, cooled, and recharged before the shields can re-engage. Shattering, on the other hand, is a catastrophic buckling of the actual barrier, which also causes an overload of the emitters and capacitors that results in failure.

 **Common variants**

The above outlines the basic functionality of the most common _technological_ variants of kinetic barrier, though there are different implementations with slightly different operation. For example, the so-called 'static' barrier – the oldest known kinetic barrier technology – does not have self-repair technology. It also lacks another key feature, namely dynamic field topology. DFT is what makes personal mobile shields practical, by allowing the emitters to 'overlay' the barrier on existing electromagnetic fields. Put simply, it is what makes it possible for your personal shield to cover your body, which it does by overlaying the barrier on top of the electromagnetic field your body naturally produces. This mechanism mimics that natural function of the biotic barrier, though inversed: Where the biotic barrier is _contained by_ the body's electromagnetic bubble, the synthetic barrier lies on top of it. More on that later.

There are some barriers that forego the recover mechanism, which gives them significantly more longevity but a vastly lowered threshold for shattering. Others forego the balancing mechanic, opting instead for a much more complicated system of redundant barrier layers. This has several advantages, including higher resistance to overloads and disruptor charges and reduced vulnerability to shattering, but the design has proven somewhat unreliable in combat and these shields can't be upgraded easily with bigger and better capacitors. If these design challenges can be overcome, redundant-layer barriers have the potential to supplant standard shield designs due to their other advantages, such as the resistance to biotic effects caused by layers intersecting when affected by dark energy impacts.

The final 'odd duck' among the most common shield designs is the so-called 'elastic barrier'. This is an Asari design, proprietary and fiercely protected by the owners and inventors in the Armali Council guilds. In very simple terms, this is a kinetic barrier technology with _extremely_ narrow tolerance on the emitter, such that it allows _no_ push effect on the barrier field. Normally, this would be a very bad idea because this all but guarantees that the shield will buckle on impact, and that is indeed what happens with elastic shields. However, through mostly unknown means the Asari have managed to make this shield highly resistant to shattering. I say _mostly_ unknown, because we have learned some things from observation, for example that the parts of the shield bubble that doesn't buckle in compensate for the buckling by 'bowing out', an effect similar to poking at a half-filled balloon. Since elastic barriers have no need for a recover mechanism, they have significantly increased longevity. They also have a much, much higher threshold for shattering than any other personal barrier system.

 **Biotic barriers**

The public tends to think of biotic barriers as simply the 'natural' version of your everyday tech-based kinetic barrier. However, that is wildly inaccurate. Not only do they work on different principles, but they work with different mechanics that matter quite a bit to weapons designers.

The most famous example of this is probably the fact that while tech barriers have no effect on, and are unaffected by, most melee attacks, biotic barriers _can_ protect against many such attacks if the biotic is sufficiently prepared and trained. The reason for this is fairly simple: Tech barriers are made up of very thin barrier layers that harden and lock in place single atomic layers of matter when affected by sufficient force, while biotic barriers are relatively thick and offer _increased resistance_ the further you penetrate through it. In other words, biotic barriers give a _gradient response_ to impacts, with only the innermost layer functioning identically to tech barriers.

A related misconception here is that there is a distinction between deploying and reinforcing a barrier. All biotics are able to deploy a barrier, and they work as outlined above. However, some biotics are also able to _reinforce_ , or _thicken,_ the barrier. This does not increase the capacity of the barrier, but it increases its _resistance rating_. It is this increase in damage resistance that is usually referred to as the 'barrier ability' by biotics, which makes sense when you realise that _all_ biotics can spawn a barrier but _few_ can reinforce it.

Biotic barriers can't fail, technically, but the innermost layer can shatter. When that happens, this causes damage to the wearer's biotic amp, which doesn't self-repair very quickly, and leaves the wearer incapable of redeploying the barrier for a while. There is some experimental work in improving the design of amps to plug into standard shield capacitors in armour to power improved self-repair mechanisms in the amps. This would allow biotic barriers to benefit from upgraded shield capacitors in much the same way that regular kinetic barriers do, though it would also allow them to fail in the same way.

An additional difficulty with biotic barriers is that they are rarely compatible with kinetic barrier technology, meaning that few kinetic barriers can be used in conjunction with biotic barriers due to various interference effects. If one day we are able to strengthen biotic barriers using standard shield capacitor systems, this shouldn't be too problematic as it would allow biotic barriers to completely supplant kinetic barriers for biotics even outside of their armour. At the moment, the only reason biotics generally use non-biotic kinetic barriers is simply that they tend to have a much higher capacity.

In addition to the standard DFT-like biotic barrier that surrounds the body, most biotics are capable of projecting what are essentially static barriers. They tend to be dome-shaped, though are not necessarily fully formed domes. These barriers are significantly more tuneable than the standard barriers, to the extent that they _can_ be tuned to even block out the atmosphere, and Asari commandos are known to use them actively in melee combat to block incoming strikes.

 **Defeating the barrier**

Though some gunsmiths expand their expertise to include kinetic barrier design, maintenance, and manufacture, the primary reason for most of us to learn about them is to help us find ways of overcoming them in our weapon designs. The two most common ways of doing so have already been mentioned: Rapid-fire weapons have a multiplier effect on kinetic barriers, and everyone knows that breaking down barriers is the main purpose of overload mines and similar solutions. However, it is worth investigating _why_ overloads are effective, because it points the way to alternatives.

Overload actually works differently between tech barriers and biotic barriers. With kinetic barriers, overload charges usually arc across the pseudo-surface of the barrier until jumping the gap into the barrier emitters, causing significant damage. Alternatively, some overload mine designs fly slow enough to bypass the barrier and only detonate on contact with a hard target. Most armour systems are designed to guide the current into the barrier as a way to dump the charge into the ground, which leads to the same effect with damage to the emitters.

This difference between the two types of overload charges has no impact on their functionality against biotic barriers. Here, the mechanism is simple enough: Shock the user, damage their amp. The break in concentration and the damage to the amp will either weaken the barrier or cause the target to drop it. Should we succeed in reinforcing biotic barriers with shield capacitors, it is likely that the capacitors will act as buffers for this damage, which would have the effect of making them behave nearly identically to kinetic barriers under overload damage.

Disruptor ammunition obviously work on the same principles, though with lesser charge dumped into the barrier. Protonic and phasic ammo, however, works on entirely different principles. Protonic projectiles are more accurately referred to as _particle bolts_ , if you remember back to chapter 3. The explanation for how they bypass shields was somewhat rudimentary there, I will try to expand on it here:

Each particle in the cloud will count as an impact on the barrier, but they all carry so little force individually that none of them move the barrier much. Therefore, protonic ammo does _very_ little damage to shields, though it does bypass them simply because even though each impact sets off the barrier the projectile is so small that it doesn't contain enough mass to both trigger the barrier and be halted by it. Theoretically, that would require a two-atom thick projectile, with the first atom triggering it and the second being halted by it. Now, protonic shavers are imperfect, and some larger particles will exist in the cloud. These would normally be stopped by the barrier, but they aren't. As mentioned in chapter 3, protonic ammo is largely positively charged, having been stripped of electrons. This adds to their bypass effectiveness by inducing microcurrents on the pseudo-surface of the barrier around the impact area, and these currents locally disrupt the barrier's function.

Phasic ammo works around this principle, but it a much more mechanically simple (and cheaper) way. Instead of stripping electrons away from the particle bolts, which requires high-precision components, they overcharge the particle bolt. This added negative charge does not damage the shield emitters in the same way as disruptor ammo, and it can't arc across to the body, but it causes localised disruptions, similarly to protonic ammunition, that cascade outward and trigger the emitters to compensate as they register an incomplete field. This in turn causes a cascading increase in power draw through the emitters, damaging them as they go out of tolerance limits.

Phasic ammo is not particularly popular in Council space, as it is generally less effective at bypassing shields than protonic ammo is, but because the damage reduction is lower this type is significantly more popular in the Terminus where kinetic barrier tech is generally older and inferior to that in Council space. They also damage shields more than protonic ammo does, and if the experimental hybrid-phasic technology mentioned in chapter 3 pans out it is likely that this ammo type will be significantly more effective against barriers than even disruptor ammo.

Finally, although warp ammunition has very little impact on weapon design – you generally can't design weapons around it, as only biotics can apply it – it is worth mentioning here as it has a significant effect on biotic barriers. This effect comes about through two channels, the primary being the same as with disruptor ammo, namely breaking the concentration of the target and disrupting neural control over the barrier. The secondary effect is more direct to the barrier itself, with the intersecting mass effect fields of the warp round and the barrier causing a minor cascade of biotic detonations around the impact site. This cascade can eventually settle as a lingering warp field effect throughout the barrier which can in turn be detonated by biotic strikes. There are some theories that suggest this 'priming' effect can be exploited by some types of ammunition, and by tech attacks, though it has yet to be demonstrated in practice.

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 **Author's notes** : I do not own Mass Effect.

I meant to make this a chapter on both shields and armour, but I found that kinetic barriers are generally complicated enough to comprise a dedicated chapter. Their mechanics are also vague enough that it's slightly challenging to put it all into a consistent framework, as illustrated by my conclusion that shield capacitors don't actually provide more power to the barrier itself, but rather more power to allow it to keep running as its emitters are damaged. Honestly, it was the only way I could make the shield gate effect feasible.

Edit: Left a remnant of a sentence I took out. Killed it.


	7. Armour

**Armour**

Just as it is important to a gunsmith to understand kinetic barriers in order to defeat them, so too must one understand armour in all its forms. In many ways, and for many reasons, understanding armour is even more important than understanding shields. Perhaps most notably because armour is much, much more widespread than shielding systems. This is largely because barriers are relatively expensive and armour is not; after all, anyone can put together crude armour with some rags and scrap metal. And as the joke goes, most armour in the Terminus is little more than just that.

As with most memes, there is some truth in its source. Whereas in Council space your basic combat-grade kinetic barrier costs less than the average consumer-grade omni-tool, the story is quite different in the Terminus. Not only will the average citizen of the Terminus have much less funds available, but trade difficulties and expenses mean that the available barriers on Terminus markets are generally more expensive and lower-grade. You're not likely to find any consumer-grade environmental barriers, in other words. On Terminus worlds, umbrellas are still a thing.

Because of this lack of availability and affordability, focus has remained on armour in the 'uncivilised' regions of space. And also because of this, the armour of the Terminus has _completely_ different characteristics from those found in Council space.

 **Terminus-style armour**

Often thought of as 'basic' armour, I think this is a bit of a misconception. It is basic in the sense that it isn't _overly complex_ , but using the word 'basic' implies that it is less effective, which is simply untrue. Terminus armour is broadly classified in two ways: Weight and grade. The weight is usually light, medium, or heavy, and indicates how much of the wearer's body its plating covers as well as the thickness of the plating. Higher weight means better protection, but lower mobility. The grade indicates the quality of the plating, effectively its damage resistance rating (which multiplies non-linearly with the thickness of the plating).

The grade system can be a bit tricky, enough so that even calling it a 'system' is a bit of a stretch. Remember, there are effectively no standards in the Terminus. 'Low-grade' armour plating is _usually_ what you call bulk-material plating, that is armour plating consisting of a single, non-structured material. Obviously, even within this grade there is _a lot_ of variation in terms of quality and effectiveness. Higher grades of plating are usually constructed from structured composite materials or even nanostructured metamaterials, offering protection from a broad range of damage profiles.

However, some non-structured bulk-material plating, notably xenthite plating, offers superior plating to even some high-grade metamaterial plating. Often, metamaterial plating is made with specific uses in mind, resulting in high-grade plating with lower-grade performance. And famously, some composite plating deteriorates with time, quickly becoming more useless than even scrap metal plating. So clearly this isn't how grades are delineated in practice, it's more a rule of thumb, but it _is_ a useful one in the sense that it explains much of the pricing structure and design decisions for the weaponry of the Terminus. Since the majority of protection is low-grade, the majority of weapons is designed to overcome low-grade protection.

In the Terminus, price and practicality is everything, and this has led to a situation where the majority of the population wield weaponry that the richer minorities are nearly invulnerable against, and wield protection that might as well not exist should said minority decide to attack them.

 **Council armour**

There is a fundamental mechanical difference between Terminus-style armours and Council-style armour: Where the former is 'classic' in the sense that it aims to stop bullets from penetrating into the body either by deflection or by deformation, the latter instead opts for an entirely different approach. Council armours generally are not intended to outright stop projectiles from penetrating, but rather aim to _reduce damage_ from projectiles. To that end, the low-grade plating you find in Terminus armours simply do not exist in Council space. Here, all combat-grade armours are nanostructured metamaterial plating, designed to slow projectiles and deform them such that their damage is reduced.

This relates somewhat to the Citadel rank model, in that armours are generally rated by their ability to reduce damage to models across a broad range of incoming damage profiles. The Council Standard of Gun Regulation makes no mention of armours, and they aren't legally regulated – there is no limitation on what grade of armour anyone can buy, anyone who has enough money can buy a Colossus Mark X armour legally – but since most major armour manufacturers _primarily_ deal in weaponry, they found that it made economical and practical sense to operate within a similar framework for their armours as well.

However, the choice of damage reduction versus damage negation has nothing to do with the rank model, and in fact predates its conception by over a century. In Council space, the ubiquity of kinetic barriers has brought a focus on long-term survivability in battle situations. Barriers negate all incoming damage, but when they fall the armour comes into play, and over time damage to the armour accumulates and reduces its effectiveness. This reduces the long-term survivability of the wearer in battle. To remedy this, armour designers turned to self-repairing materials, but they found that the same structures that allowed self-repair also inhibited the material's protection rating.

What they next realised was that this didn't matter too much. With integrated medical systems and kinetic barriers as a standard component of armours, armour didn't _have_ to reliably stop bullets on first impact, they had to reliably reduce damage from bullets even after _many_ impacts. It wasn't the job of the armour to stop the bullets, that was the job of the barrier. The armour's job was to keep the wearer alive while the barrier was down, and while proper classical armour plating allowed for damage negation, it was also bulky, heavy, and incapable of anything beyond very limited self-repair.

It was from this thinking that armour design dramatically diverged between Council space and the Terminus. In the latter, focus remained on improving the ability of plating materials to stop bullets, while in the former the focus shifted to the impact of the armour on the overall performance of the wearer. Armours became complex pieces of combat equipment, with standardised interfaces for kinetic barriers and integrated capacitors and emitter arrays, combat sensor suites, communications, and HUD systems. Systems that for space reasons previously only belonged in frame and power armour were now making their way into regular combat hardsuits, with modern reduction plating taking up less space and weighing less than before.

Council-style armours come in three weights, light, medium, and heavy. Light armour is the basic combat hardsuit, offering maximum flexibility and maximum self-repair ability. Heavier sets adds more traditional plating to important areas, still with good self-repair ability that makes it technically lower-grade than the Terminus equivalent. The added weight and bulk decreases the wearer's flexibility, and decreases the overall ability of the armour to self-repair. The latter has an interesting implication in that the self-repair ability has proven a good counter to lingering biotic and tech attacks, making them wear off quicker. So, while heavier sets of armour give more protection against weapons fire, lighter armour has an advantage against tech and biotics.

 **Frame and power armour**

The final type of armour that needs to be covered is the class that is sometimes referred to by armourers as 'augmentation harnesses'. These are suits of armour that not only protects the wearer, but vastly improves their offensive combat capabilities. There are two types to mention: Power armour is a term used to describe a large suit of armour that could be said to be a large mech with a person inside, while frame armour just slightly adds to the size of the wearer.

Right now, both types are considered non-practical for military uses due to a plethora of unresolved issues mainly relating to reliability and command lag. The last known military venture into frame armour technology was the Systems Alliance's ill-fated T5 series, described in official combat testing logs as a 'fancy coffin'. However, these systems remain a mainstay of various combat technology skunkworks labs all across the galaxy, including those of my own Close Corporation. Should the problems that have plagued these technologies be resolved, they promise to dramatically change the battlefields of the future.

 **Armour mods**

While not very common in in the Terminus _at all_ , standardised armour modifications are essential pieces of kit for a Council space combatant. Mods (or upgrades, depending on who you are speaking to) range broadly in effects and capability, though the most common ones are generally classified as either medical, protective, environmental, or augmenting upgrades.

Medical upgrades are any upgrades that work on the biology of the wearer. This includes first aid and medical interfaces, which help heal minor wounds and filter toxins from the bloodstream; stimulant packs, which manipulates the body's chemistry to speed up recovery and reaction times and reduces fatigue mid-combat; and medical exoskeletons, which specifically act to reduce the stress on the wearer from physical exertions rather than increasing their physical capabilities (the latter would make it an augmenting upgrade, an important legal distinction).

Protective upgrades range from simple hard-shell armour plating that fits on top of the regular armour, through ablative composite plating, Foucault current-reinforced metamaterial plating (usually just called 'energized plating'), to the oft-misunderstood 'hardened weave' upgrades. Weaves are simply an advanced inner layer which dissipates lingering biotic effects faster than the regular self-repair does, and uses VI-controlled targeted disruptive interference to do the same with tech effects. Advanced weaves also include secondary capacitors that can increase the speed at which your shields can recover.

Environmental upgrades encompass a large selection of mods, in that the term includes _any_ modification that improves the wearer's tolerance of or resistance to unfriendly environmental conditions. These could be toxins and general environmental hazards, or even pressurized seals that allow the combat hardsuit to offer a completely insulated internal environment for long-term exposure to zero-atmosphere conditions.

Finally, there is the category of _augmenting_ upgrades. These are mods that enhance the wearer's capabilities in specific ways, such as providing kinetic buffering to increase stability when firing guns and/or increased accuracy while mobile, motorised joints and powered exoskeleton upgrades to increase the wearer's strength (and weight), or shock absorbers that dissipate incoming kinetic energy, to name a few. There are also a host of experimental, non-standard upgrades in this category that increase biotic energy output using unstable dark energy capacitors, dissipates static biotic charge which enables biotics to use their powers more often without damaging their nervous system, increases the wearer's top speed, and so on. There are also some advanced upgrades that uses micro-motors in the joints controlled by advanced targeting suites which supposedly improves the wearer's aim, and of course the Batarians are fond of melee upgrades such as spike gauntlets and bladed edges.

 **Overcoming armour**

As a side effect of the change in armour design in Council territory, the classic armour piercing ammunition is less effective against Council-style combat hardsuits than they are against the more traditional armour of the Terminus. In fact, they give little added benefit over non-modded ammo, and perform _significantly_ worse than anti-personnel ammo. The reason for this is rather simple: AP ammo works through non-deformity, which is _very difficult_ when you are hitting metamaterial armour plating that actively deforms and slows. Anti-personnel ammo, such as Shredder mods, _utilises_ deformation to increase damage. It is, effectively, the difference between going with or against the proverbial grain.

Which is not to say that AP ammo is useless. Not at all, it is after all the most common ammo modification out there, but its utility is very different between the Terminus and the Council. In Terminus combat, AP ammo retains its traditional role and importance. On the other hand, in Council space AP ammo is most effectively utilised against mechs, drones, and vehicles. As it has very little impact on performance against soft targets, it ends up having lots of pros and no real cons even if its name has become a bit of a misnomer in modern combat.

 **The future of armour**

It's worth discussing the likely future of armour here, because there are some very clear trends in the research and development space in this field right now and they promise to change the armour paradigm once again. The large militaries, the Alliance in particular, are currently investing heavily in modular and hybrid combat hardsuit technologies. It is likely that down the line – within just a few years at most – this will mean that armour can be customised much more easily, with different components providing different advantages and disadvantages relative to each other.

This is similar to how armour already works for the rich in the Terminus – plating and tech suites are generally customised to the wearer – but the difference is that, this being Council space tech, all the connections and interfaces will be standardised, which brings with it a whole host of advantages, perhaps most notably in affordability and flexibility. In the Terminus, once armour is customised it stays that way. Council-style modular armour, however, can be modified on the fly by simply swapping pieces of the armour.

It is likely that this might signal a return of the hard-shell armour as well, though probably not as the standard. The standardised modularisation is likely to find its way to the Terminus, where the preference is still for hard-shell, and this will mean that there will be hard-shell modules and even full modular armours available. Additionally, tech armour is getting increasingly popular and effective, and will likely combine favourably with modularised combat hardsuits due to the standardised interfaces probably easily accommodating the necessary flash forges and plating harnesses.

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...

 **Author's note:** I do not own the rights to Mass Effect.

So that's two updates from me in just a few days. Dunno what's up with that.

This chapter is rather short, I am aware. Thing is, armour is fairly straightforward during the ME1 timeframe, it gets more interesting later (as hinted at toward the end there, and in the augmenting upgrades section).


	8. Combat tech: Omni-tools, mines, and gren

**Combat tech: Mines, grenades, and omni-tools**

Out of all the tools in the gunsmith's toolkit, none comes close to the usefulness and versatility of the omni-tool. It is used in every stage of the design and manufacturing process. You do your research on it, you do your calculations with it, you use it to draw up your blueprints, manufacture your parts, and of course you use it during assembly. And, of course, you use it for diagnostics, tuning, disassembly, and repairs. In short, the omni-tool _is_ your toolkit.

Therefore, it stands to reason that any gunsmith with respect for their work would learn the ins and outs of the tool, how it works and how it doesn't, what it does and how it does it. But I would argue that it would be foolish of the gunsmith to limit their understanding to that of an omni-tool power user. For hundreds of years, gunsmiths have integrated omni-tool technologies into their weapon designs. Some of those designs have stood the test of time better than most others.

The Batarian Kishock harpoon gun design is the oldest weapon still in active state military service, as the standard-issue sniper rifle for the Hegemony's Fleet, Army, and most of its Planetary Militia forces. Now, the Batarians aren't exactly known for keeping their military equipment up-to-date, but the fact that their SIU forces also largely stick with the Kishock for marksman and sniper duties is a testament to its impressive design. It remains the top seller for Batarian State Arms over 200 years after the original patent rights to the weapon expired.

This book will contain a case study chapter dedicated to this weapon, but I bring it up here because the reason the weapon has held up so well for so long is quite simple: The core of the weapon is the omni-tool. It's a simple construction, the very basics of a weapon with a few parts taken out. It has the standard static-power accelerator and guide rail barrel, a small – some would say undersized – eezo core, a rather bulky heatsink system, and a basic controller VI for the power systems. However, in place of the ammo block, shaver, loading chamber, waste barrel, and firing control VI, it has a disassembled omni-tool.

The tool flash forges the weapon's projectiles on a slide track, replicating the 'cocking' motion of old chemical propellant bolt-action weapons. You can easily modify the weapon to use the standard extrusion-based flash forging, thus eliminating the cocking action, but that would actually remove the reason the Kishock has managed to stay competitive for so long. Extruders are slightly variable, and their operation parameters change significantly from omni-tool to omni-tool. This is the reason why you generally don't use the flash forges for precision work; what comes out as 1mm in one tool may be 1.5mm in another. For most purposes this doesn't matter much, but when you are forging a projectile inside an enclosed space it certainly does. Further, the primary reason for the flash forge component of the omni-tool is its speed, and this has improved greatly over time. This causes inevitable timing issues with the gun's controller VI program, incidentally also installed directly on the omni-tool rather than in a dedicated frame chip.

All of this taken together means that if modified like this, it becomes much harder to improve the weapon later. Where otherwise you would only have to swap out the omni-tool components with newer ones, if you changed to the extrusion model you would have to go through extensive testing and rewriting of controller VI code to accommodate the changed physical parameters and timings.

This is the weapon's strength: The base model can stay constant, and as long as omni-tool technology keeps progressing the weapon's performance will keep up with the competition. All you have to do is buy a modern omni-tool, disassemble it, and slot its long-standardised components into the weapon frame.

Of course, the Kishock is not the only weapon that follows this basic model. In fact, it is not even an entirely original design. The basic concept of the omni-tool based firing mechanism was pioneered nearly two millennia ago by the Krogan, with a weapon that is still around today albeit with many improvements added in: The Graal.

The Graal traces its roots to before the Tuchankan nuclear winter, though it was not married to the omni-tool until after the Rachni War. Rumour has it that Raik Vol himself was the first to replace the old metal spike loading mechanism with a disassembled omni-tool, giving him a weapon that manufactured its own spikes. The weapon has never officially been mass produced, each clan having their own variants made to order for individual warriors.

Point being, the omni-tool has potential to be much more than just a tool. It can also provide components and mechanisms for implementation in weapon designs, and this is already common enough that you will need this level of skill and knowledge with them to be able to do even basic repair and maintenance work in on these weapons. Particularly if you're operating in the Terminus or Traverse, where the Graal and the Kishock remain some of the most common high-end weapons

 **Mines and grenades**

In the Terminus and the Traverse it is expected that gunsmiths also manufacture standard frame mines, grenades, and tech launchers. The markets in these regions of space simply cannot accommodate the level of specialisation we see in Council space, so the gunsmith is to be considered the go-to expert for any form of weaponry, including combat tech. Fortunately, any good gunsmith would have more than sufficient knowledge of omni-tool forges and fabrication to get into this sort of design and manufacturing work, but it's worth doing a run-down of the basics nonetheless.

First, it is important to keep in mind a significant difference between Terminus and Council loadout standards. While fighters operating in Council space would simply rely on their omni-tool for all their tech launcher needs, there are two factors that keep the old separate tech launcher the standard in the Terminus still:

1\. Cost

2\. Security

People in the wild west of the galaxy are generally rather paranoid about hacking and information attacks, in large part because of their proximity to the Perseus Veil and the Geth threat beyond it. Further, it is known that from the early days of AI research in Council space, some AI still remain in operation and they are all thought to reside somewhere in the Terminus. The most high-profile of these being the rumoured "Omega AI" controlled by the Queen of Omega herself, of course.

As a result of this paranoia, Terminus fighters tend to avoid tight integrations between their information systems and their weapons. The system chips on an omni-tool, particularly the older models that are more common in the Terminus, are vulnerable to hacking, which could prove disastrous in a fight if it meant the fighter lost access to their tech mines. This is likely the primary reason why they have stuck with the separate belt-carry tech launcher despite the rest of the galaxy having moved on centuries ago. The other reason being that the tech launcher generally has a greater mine carrying capacity than the omni-tool.

Of course, the downside to this is that while the average Terminus tech-inclined fighter would come prepared with _a lot_ of mines, they will eventually run out. That is not necessarily the case for your average Council fighter. A tech launcher comes pre-stocked with the functional parts of the mines – the inner workings, so to speak – and contains a flash forge that fabricates the mine shell when it launches. It does _not_ have a microfabricator to replenish the mine supply during combat, however. The omni-tool _does_ have that, so while you may enter combat with a lower supply, that supply will be slowly replenished during use.

The mine itself can be a fairly complicated thing. The most standard 'special' tech mine is the overload design, which comes in a few variations as briefly mentioned in chapter 6. Roughly speaking, you have two classes of overload mines: Slow and standard. Of the two, the slow overload is the oldest. They are regular mines with an overcharged capacitor surrounded by an arcing medium, usually a compressed liquid which will burst into a conductive fog when the mine's shell breaks. The shell itself is normally structured to burst into microfragments, and is charged opposite from the capacitor within the mine. This mine flies too slowly to be stopped by barriers, and detonates upon hitting a target. Upon detonation, the combination of the charged microfragments and the conductive fog causes a catastrophic discharge of the capacitor into the cloud and the target. Chaining can be achieved through wider scattering of the impact cloud, or more recently through onboard 'sub-mines' (usually of the now more standard 'bullet' type designs).

This design is largely falling out of favour, since the amount of charge you can keep on the capacitor is rather limited. Instead, modern overload designs tend to launch a much smaller, very fast projectile which leaves behind a temporary conductive particle trail. With this design, the electricity is supplied from the capacitors in the user's armour or omni-tool, with the particle trail acting as a wire. The standard method of chaining for this more modern class of overload mines is a wide-dispersal projectile approach, that is, upon impact the overload projectile bursts into a particle cloud which allows the electricity to arc to nearby targets.

The single major limitation of this design is its range, as the pseudo-wire decays rapidly. There have been experiments in extending the range through essentially dumping the charge into the wire before it decays, based on the theory that the active charge should extend the lifetime of the wire. While the theory has been proven correct, the experiments have yet to succeed outside of a tightly controlled lab environment. Even minor fluctuations in air currents can break the circuit, rendering the whole thing useless.

I mentioned that the old design was a 'regular mine', and it is worth briefly covering what that means. The standard mine is a discus design, a 'flying saucer', similar to the larger Alliance Marines standard-issue grenade. This similarity is not coincidence. The discus design is capable of stable and steady flight with minimal impulse, and is accurate to a fault. There is no such thing as an 'unlucky throw' with a discus grenade, it flies exactly to where you threw it. If it's off, it's because your throw was bad. It does not curve, it does not weave, it does not deviate. It _can_ , however, easily be modified to do so, and many highly effective guided discus designs exist and are in active use. This versatility, and the fact that it can be launched accurately with minimal impulse and very simple launch mechanisms, is why it has become the standard design for tech mines.

No matter the design, it is clear that no tech mine is as simple as your classic grenade with a fragmentation shell containing an explosive. Curiously, this largely comes down to the limitations of a tech mine versus grenades. Tech mines are _always_ smaller – at least at launch – than even the smallest grenade. That means that you are limited to a very small amount of explosive, relatively speaking, so your damage must come from a more clever application of science than the basic chemicals-go-boom approach. The second most popular mine design, popularly termed the 'Incinerate' mine, is a good example of this. While most incinerate designs are fairly basic in that they rely on a compressible, flammable liquid contained in an ignition shell, the most basic application of this design is _terribly_ inefficient and could barely light a candle. Again, you need a more clever application of science. Universally, incinerates of this type incorporates some mechanism for both broadly dispersing and thinning out the liquid payload in order to maximise both the impact of and the intensity of the burn. Thinning out the liquid causes it to burn faster (more intensely) and ignite more readily and completely, while broad dispersal ensures that the target is completely covered in the burning liquid. The effectiveness of the mine then depends on the chemistry of the liquid, the tuning of the dispersal mechanism, and the ignition timing.

More recently, incineration designs using an entirely different approach have appeared. Exploiting the fact that fine powders suspended in air readily combust, this kind of mine avoids the complexity of the standard dispersal mechanism and needs only an over-pressure design to 'puff' the powder into the air around the victim, after which a simple spark is enough to ignite the dust cloud. While this design shows a great deal of promise, including the possibility of a practical omni-tool based flamethrower design, it has some significant weaknesses relative to the liquid-based designs. First and foremost, there has been some difficulty finding an effective powder formula that can both stick to targets and _not_ stick to itself. This means that you first get an air-blast combustion, which then immediately falls to the ground as the powder burns. As you can imagine, this is not particularly effective.

Though tech mines invariably are more 'clever' than grenades, out of simple necessity, that does not at all mean that the larger grenades are always primitive in their design. While yes, many of them are – fragmentation grenades, for all their brutish effectiveness, have a _very_ simple design – there are plenty of exceptions to this. Take the Batarian Inferno grenade design, for instance. While certainly both brutal and barbaric, it is far from simplistic. The basic Inferno has a large liquid container in a sphere that consists of several separate chamber segments. These sphere segments are constructed out of a stable, solid flammable medium that burns at several thousand Kelvin. The core of the sphere is hollow, such that the segments are affixed to an explosive core coated in a 'glue' that serves as both a safety and an igniter. When inert, you can smash the grenade with a Krogan war hammer and it will at most just shatter. But when you deliver a precisely tuned electric shock to the glue, it becomes kinetically reactive. Meaning that when the grenade impacts a surface, the kinetic shockwave causes the glue to ignite both the segment material and the explosive core of the grenade. The result? Essentially a fragmentation grenade where the fragments burn with an intense heat that spreads everywhere and ignites everything around it.

There is a tendency in the public military and law enforcement discourse to speak of different mine and grenade designs as 'primitive' or 'barbaric' versus 'sophisticated' and 'advanced'. In my experience, these are utterly useless descriptions that reveal nothing but the ignorance of those who use them. Tech mines of all kinds are necessarily complex and generally clever in design, but that doesn't mean grenades are any less so. That they don't _have_ to be doesn't mean they _aren't_ ; more space also means more room for ingenuity. And in both classes there are designs that could be called 'barbaric', though your idea of what that means will vary depending on where you are from and who you are. One person's 'barbaric' is another person's 'efficient'.

However you feel about them, any decent gunsmith should endeavour to keep a good overview of developments in this space. Not just because integrating these technologies in weapons is something you are likely to be asked to do, but also because developments in grenade and mine technology has a direct impact on developments in protective technologies. This, in turn, has an impact on the efficacy of the weapons you design.

There is one thing that is important to note, however, and that is the difference in meaning in the phrase "producing tech mines" in the Terminus versus Council space. In the latter area, mine production is entirely decentralised. Mines are 'produced' in the sense that their basic design and construction blueprints are made available for sale, and these blueprints are then used by the buyer's omni-tool to produce these mines when needed.

In the Terminus, because of their continued preference for tech launchers, the situation is mostly different. While anyone with access to a somewhat modern omni-tool can create mines – specifically, mine mechanisms/cores – it's a laborious and tedious process. So there is still a massive market in the Terminus for factory-produced mines meant to be launched from a tech launcher, though on the high-end professional market most tend to own their own fabricators and prefer to buy the licences and blueprints where they can. This isn't always possible, though, for example with Shaaryak Inferno mines, widely considered the most effective incinerate-model mines available in the Terminus (read: _affordable_ in the Terminus). Nynsi Shaaryak prefers to keep her company's designs guarded, selling the mines at rates that are competitive enough that even professionals aren't too bothered about relying on an external supply chain for them.

 **Omni-tools - Interfaces**

As some of you may know, before I trained to be a gunsmith and before my adventures in the Traverse and Terminus during the Terminus Wars, my company – Close Corporation – maintained its considerable fortunes producing and selling some of the galaxy's finest omni-tools and general purpose VI chips. That's where I got started as an engineer, building and designing VIs and VI ships and incorporating them in innovative omni-tool packages. Using our established dominance in Alliance space as leverage, my family upended centuries of Asari dominance in this market.

The most important advantage we had was that in the few decades since the human version of the omni-tool – based, of course, on the same Prothean designs as the Asari version – we had carried over a key approach to omni-tool personalisation that even a hundred years ago was considered one of the greatest problems in personal computing: Legacy support. A short history lesson is necessary to illustrate my point:

The years 2070-2100 is sometimes referred to by Earth historians as the 'Great Digital Oblivion'. During that time, our computing and digital storage technologies changed so fundamentally and thoroughly that it is estimated that something like 99% of all data stored digitally before 2070 did not survive until 2100, in the sense that while it was still _retrievable_ , it was not _readable_ by modern devices. Plenty of data modernisation and archival efforts were undertaken both before, during, and after that period, but due to the vast ocean of digital information stored in an almost equally vast array of formats requiring different technologies to read them. Those technologies were aging and obsolete, meaning that they were both useless for modern uses and physically degrading.

For the most part, this didn't have many serious practical consequences for anyone. For any average citizen or organisation it was a mere annoyance and a slight inconvenience. However, the amount of culture and historical information that was irretrievably lost is staggering, and this fact had a massive influence on the digital technologies humans used from that point on. Legacy support, the idea that any new development in digital technology should be natively able to bridge the gap to previous generations of the same branches of technology, became a core philosophy in Earth's – and later the Alliance's – tech industry. Proprietary formats were abolished entirely, opening up the specifications of all existing and future digital formats to enable legacy support.

This was all aided by the invention of what is now known as the Alliance Standard VI Structure, by my forefather and namesake Aaron Close. The introduction of these cheap, reliable, and powerful VI architectures enabled pseudo-intelligent computing devices to interpret and adapt any known or near-known format and convert it to a form the computer it was attached to could read, and it could do this in real time. However, by the time this technology was perfected by the very end of the 21st century CE it was already too late for most of the information from that century.

It did, however, give us a great advantage when we joined the galactic economy just over half a century later. Previously, new races that joined the Council would undergo a period of adaptation, where they would be flooded with Asari-designed technologies that aided them in integrating with galactic standard computer and network systems. In our case, this was never needed, nor was it wanted. All we needed was a baseline for the galactic standard formats, and our existing technologies – aided by our highly advanced, even by Council standards, VIs – could easily adapt to interface with nearly any Council-standard tech.

This brought about a schism of sorts in omni-tool design, and this schism is why I told this story. Whereas Asari omni-tool interfaces are largely based around the concept of customised macros and gesture controls, human omni-tool interfaces were comparatively 'clunky', with standard haptic keyboards and limited gesture and adaptive interfacing technologies. You would think this a weakness, but our VIs had turned it into an advantage. Just like with the standard Asari-style 'dial' interface, the human 'wrist-pad' interface was perfectly capable of single-handed use because whatever information couldn't be conveyed by the clunky pad controls could be interpreted by the VI from much more subtle gestures that had a far greater level of customisation and wearer adaptation than the dial interfaces could accommodate. And while admittedly clunky, the wrist pad also proved to be a much more powerful tool in the hands of experts who were used to them.

Uptake has been slow, admittedly, and the Alliance military largely defaults to the dial interfaces these days due to interoperability and logistics concerns in joint manoeuvres with other militaries used to the Asari design. However, civilians in Alliance space still generally prefer the pad design, and exploration ventures both private and public tend to prefer the pad design for the increased versatility when interacting with with non-standard tech. It is known that the Alliance itself is working to develop omni-tools that can switch between the two modes. This is all made easier by the fact that even most Asari omni-tools these days incorporate the Alliance Standard VI Structure, as it is simply a better and more powerful design than what they used before while still being compatible with their old tech.

 **Omni-tools – Key differentiators**

Though the interface type is increasingly thought of as a differentiator between different omni-tools, in the current market the choice there mostly comes down to individual preferences rather than any real performance difference in most relevant scenarios. This means that while interfaces are important to consider, they are not a _key_ differentiator in most cases.

The true key differentiators in this space are as they always have been: Fabricator speed and resolution, flash forge volume, fabricator-forge bandwidth, processor architecture, storage and bandwidth capacity, data interface support, and power capacity and throughput. Beyond those differentiators, any improvement in capability comes from software and firmware, and thanks to ASVIS all modern omni-tools are platform agnostic meaning that particular software suites are no longer limited to particular omni-tool platforms. The following is a breakdown of each of these differentiators and how they impact omni-tool performance.

Fabricator speed is a measure of how quickly the microfabrication unit in the omni-tool can produce any given object or structure. This is a standardised metric in Council space, with regulations defining a standard object for testing. The object is what's known as a complex cube, a cubic object with a complex and strictly defined internal structure. The fastest speed at which an omni-tool can fabricate this object perfectly determines the speed rating of the omni-tool. Naturally, then, faster is better. Simultaneously, the object's complex internal structure is fractal in nature, and the level of detail on the fractal structure directly defines the omni-tool's fabricator resolution. Normally, high-resolution omni-tools also tend to be lower-speed, which makes sense since adding more detail takes more time. As technology develops, de-facto standard brackets for omni-tool resolution establish themselves, and manufacturers largely try to compete on fabrication speed within these brackets.

The flash forge volume is possibly the most significant differentiator in the military space. This volume is the amount of space available for the flash forge – a separate fabricator to the microfab, which manufactures with very high speed but significantly lower resolution – to both store pre-fabricated components from the microfab and construct its own structures. The metric here is straightforward, simply what is the largest static object the flash forge is capable of fabricating.

Now, all flash forges get around this limitation by means of dynamic forging, or extrusion forging, that is forging objects as they are moved through the forge rather than fabricating non-moving static objects. This is the fundamental technique that allows most of the flash forge functionality we expect today, such as omni-blade deployment, but crucially this method is severely limited when the forged object needs to contain pre-fabricated objects from the microfabricator. This is the case with tech mines, whose mechanisms and detail-work is pre-fabricated and then loaded into the flash forge where the shell and other less detail-heavy fabrication is done. This is why the tech launchers that are still common in the Terminus are as bulky as they are, despite being just a souped-up flash forge with a container for pre-fabricated mine mechanisms: You can't rely on dynamic forging for tech mines, because you have to contain the pre-fab mechanism in the mine.

There are multiple ways of getting around this to some extent, though all of them have their limits. The origami approach forges structures that unfold in a larger space when released, but that limits the content volume of the forged object. The self-replication approach includes pre-fabricated microfabricators, allowing the forged object to expand itself after release, but these are really complex pre-fabs that take a lot of time to fabricate. And since fabrication time is what is common thought of as 'cooldown' on various tech combat abilities, the resulting cooldowns here can be significant. The various popular combat drone programs ordinarily utilise a combination of the origami approach and the self-replication approach to construct large objects that can self-modify, which is necessary for most of their functionality (such as onboard regenerative weaponry).

The importance of good 'cooperation' between the flash forge and the microfabricator is the reason why the term 'forge-fabricator bandwidth' was invented. The idea here is to have a single reference metric for how well the two fabricators interact. That is, how quickly can fabricated objects move from the microfab to the forge, what is the largest object that can be moved through that pipeline, and – crucially – how many objects can be kept in that pipeline. All of these are measured by the bandwidth metric, given as the number of pipeline objects times its volume per second. A secondary effect of this metric is in how good the omni-tool is at reverse fabrication, that is the breaking-down of common materials into omni-gel, the material base used (sparingly) by flash forges and microfabs.

Previously, this metric was fairly unimportant since the flash forge and the microfabricator tended to be co-located in the same space. This is still the case with some omni-tools today, such as the baseline mil-spec Bluewire tool.

The processor architecture is the most traditional measure of the capabilities of a computing device, of course. Simply put, it indicates how capable the onboard computer is. This affects its ability to crunch numbers and run code quickly, and this remains the most crucial differentiators for electronic warfare specialists. Note that this is separate from the ASVIS chip; the VI generally acts as a filter on input and output from the processor system. If the processor system is the brains, ASVIS is the brain stem and spinal cord.

Related to this is the crucial issue of data interfaces. Every single species in the Milky Way that we have encountered so far have their own varying standards of data connectivity. Some are ancient and only around because the devices that use them are somehow still supported, some are ancient and only around because no one saw a reason to update them because they did the job, some are new and barely supported, some are new and broadly supported, some are really esoteric, some are proprietary and only used within particular organisations or even teams within organisations… there is a lot going on, and particularly for electronic warfare specialists it is important that their omni-tools are physically capable of interfacing with as wide a range of data sockets as possible, whether those sockets are physical or virtual and wireless. Now, the minimal standard for interface compatibility is the Galactic Common Interfaces Standard (GCIS, pronounced "Jesus"… the irony is not lost on me, particularly considering how often this standard has died and come back to life again). However, there are multiple specification lists that go far beyond the GCIS, though most of them now refer to it as a baseline. The current broadest spec available to manufacturers is the GCIS TCSL5 (Terminus-Compatible Specification List version 5), and no omni-tool can be considered high-end in the military market if it is not TCSL5 compliant.

Finally is the issue of power management, which is a complicated beast. All omni-tools come with its own power supply and storage. This supply, and its battery, is always severely limited. The highest power output it can generate on its own is barely sufficient to power a neural shock mine, which is essentially an underpowered but specifically modulated overload mine. This limitation can be overcome without resorting to external power, but it limits the omni-tool in other ways. Namely, the most obvious solution is to use part of the flash-forge's volume to construct and maintain a secondary power supply and battery which can increase the power capacity of the tool significantly, by a factor of 10 in the most extreme cases (though potentially more depending on the volume of the forge and how much of it you are willing to dedicate).

Some modern overload designs, based on the tethered bullet design, use this method to deliver the significant amount of energy required to make the attack effective. Since the bullet case for the overload requires relatively little volume, the rest of the forge can be dedicated to fabricating a large capacitor and a power supply that can fully charge it. The power stored in that capacitor is then meant only to be dumped into the particle wire the overload bullet leaves behind it.

More commonly, however, and particularly in military use, omni-tools interface with the user's armour system and the power supply and capacitors in it. This, again, multiplies the power capacity of the omni-tool, dramatically increasing its capabilities.

As a final aside, for many years there has been a few well-publicised and almost universally effective 'hacks' for electronic locking mechanisms that have been referred to jokingly as "slapping some omni-gel on it". The methods work in one of two ways, broadly speaking: Either by taking thorough, detailed scans of the device, and then constructing a sort of one-use universal physical key which precisely activates the exact electronic pathways in the device that are required for it to unlock, or by means of a 'targeted burn'. This 'targeted burn' is the process of dumping a massive charge into specific connections within the device, using fabricated omni-wiring and a massive capacitor. Both of these methods use _a lot_ of omni-gel compared to, say, fabricating a tech mine, but they are almost universally effective. This effectiveness has led to a lot of research into ways to defeat these approaches, and in a boon for my own company the primary venue of research at the moment is the implementation of a VI-to-VI interface that randomises the physical connections required to open a lock and locks permanently when overcharged.

 **Conclusions**

This field – omni-tools, tech mines, grenades, and related combat technologies – is a huge subject and an even bigger market. It is important for any gunsmith to keep on top of at least the basics in the field, as it has both a direct and an indirect effect on their job. New capabilities in electronic warfare, for example, means new precautions need to be taken in designing the controller architectures of your weapons. Many a manufacturer have been caught out from new developments in omni-tool technologies.

As an example, one of the contributing causes to Batarian State Arms' precipitous fall in market share in Council space was, famously, its vulnerability to a passive broadcast attack targeted at a vulnerability in one of their main wireless interfaces. The attack effectively left BSA weapons non-functional in the presence of an omni-tool broadcasting a signal created by a piece of software openly available on the Extranet. It was the final nail in the coffin for BSA in Council space, and they also took a hit in the Terminus despite most Terminus editions of their weapons having their wireless interfaces disabled. Since then, of course, BSA is known for leaving out wireless interfaces completely in their weapon designs, with the notable exception of the Kishock due to its very old and well-entrenched omni-tool based design making this practically impossible.

And don't think that going the BSA route of removing all wireless interfaces makes you entirely safe from electronic warfare. There are still at least two other routes that can be taken to breach your gun's electronics: Precision electromagnetic interference (which the STG is believed to make use of) and microdrone attacks. Microdrones are tiny insect-sized drones that are very hard to spot, that physically land on the weapon and connects to the weapon's physical interfaces to deliver its payload. These are very hard to protect against, especially if you are not up to date on developments in the electronic warfare game.

* * *

 **A/N: I do not own the Mass Effects.**

So, this took a while to get out, and I'm terribly sorry I haven't updated MI:CC in ages. Combination of busy schedule and lack of energy (both creative and otherwise). This particular chapter is something I've had mostly ready for quite a while, but every time I sat down to 'finish' it the thing just ended up growing. I put in a fair amount of background for Aaron in here, hopefully that compensates a little bit.

Also, I would like to note that Andromeda has been a very pleasant surprise for me on the tech side of things. As far as I can tell, _nothing_ of what I've written in Gunsmith is invalidated at all by the tech we see in Andromeda, and the same goes for the tech in MI:CC. Which feels like a vindication of the work I've put into this. Hell, they even introduced the concept of the ODSY mass effect core, which is almost exactly the same as the cores on the _Archangel_ , the _Trireme_ core design's static siphoning system ( _Trireme_ referenced in chapter 17, static siphoning in chapter 9). Was chuffed when I read the Codex entry on the ODSY, I have to say :)

As always, thoughts, questions, ideas, etc are most welcome. Reviews are my lifeblood. Thank you for reading and reviewing!


	9. Frame armour

**Frame armour**

"One of the great follies of arms engineering throughout modern and pre-modern times has been the development of manned robotic exoskeletal armoured weapons platforms, known commonly as frame armour or mech suits."

This was the opening line to the three paragraph-long section that dealt with the subject of frame armour in the previous edition of this book, written by the legendary Salarian master gunsmith Utol Bau. She clearly had no faith in this line of development, and looking at the historical record one would be forgiven for agreeing with her judgment. Every species in Council space has, at one point or another, attempted to develop and even deploy military-grade frame armour. After all, it makes sense: Soldiers in frame armour can theoretically carry heavier weaponry, fire more accurately, sustain fire longer, move faster, and take much more damage than a conventionally geared soldier. And, again in theory, since manned robotic exoskeletons have been in regular use for hundreds of years in various industries, most notably in warehouses and shipyards, how difficult can it be to slap on some armour and weapon systems?

Very difficult, is the answer. First, you have to overcome the challenge of adding armour plating that meets the following criteria:

Does not impede movement of the exoskeleton

Does not expose the exoskeleton to external damage

Does not weigh down the exoskeleton enough to impede the performance of the joint motors

Still offers improved protection for the wearer compared to conventional armour

Second, you have to develop combat intelligence and computer assistance systems that improve upon those found in conventional armour systems, without causing any of 1-4 to fail. Then you have to add weapon systems, coolant systems, targeting systems and so on, still without causing 1-4 to fail. And only once you succeed in all of this – which very few have managed – do you come across the single greatest engineering challenge of any such project: The multiple geometries problem, or the "double volume" problem.

Industrial exoskeletons only have to process the movement of a single geometry: The form of its wearer. But the moment you 'slap on some armour', the exoskeletons have to process and manage the movements of _two_ forms; that of the wearer, and that of the armour. This may not sound too challenging, and many solutions ranging from the simplistic to the hugely complex have been proposed, but in practice it has turned out to be the single most difficult problem to solve. A single mobility system has to account for the unequal but synchronised motion of two separate and overlapping forms.

The most popular proposed solutions have fallen into a few distinct categories:

Deformable armour plating to minimise the problem of inequality of movement between the armour and the wearer

Integrating the exoskeleton with the armour plating, thereby eliminating most of its bulk and the inequality of movement

Oversizing the frame, nearly or completely eliminating the problem altogether

The first two always end up meaning that the frame armour will fail on either points 2 or 4 above, thus making the system as a whole either not worth it in comparison to standard armour, or too vulnerable and actually _inferior_ to standard armour. And the third comes close to failure to qualify as frame armour altogether, moving closer to the 'mech' concept the Alliance worked in its shelved Atlas program. Still, this is the avenue that has proven historically most successful. During the Terminus Wars, certain Batarian-dominated PMCs actually fielded such oversized frame armour. Like the Atlas, extremity control was semi-indirect, with the wearer 'stepping into' an armour frame whose _bulk movement_ – movement of the larger joints, such as hip, shoulders, knees, elbows – was directly controlled, but all finer movement was essentially entirely robotic and controlled indirectly. Put simply, the hand of the wearer is not actually inside the hand of the armour. In some models, the _arm_ wasn't even inside of the arm of the armour, instead being locked in a harness within the torso that exaggerated movement.

Although powerful and fairly successful on the battlefield, it was a clunky design that was continuously updated throughout deployments, and it was plagued by systems failures. It is my understanding that the Blades still make use of these armours, but now mostly for guard duties after the Wars ended.

And while all of these problems alone are enough to kill most frame armour efforts, we haven't even begun to take cost considerations into account. _That_ is usually where these projects sink. Ultimately, you get a lot more firepower for your money by investing in a squad of well-equipped soldiers with heavy mech support than you get for an equivalent investment in frame armour.

So why, then, are frame armour concepts still pursued at all? And why have I chosen to include frame armour in its own chapter of this book, when in the previous edition it barely warranted a derisive mention and a couple of historical paragraphs?

Because I think the engineering challenges inherent to these projects are just that, _challenges_. They are there to be overcome, and they are not solid obstacles blocking the path. In fact, we _know_ it can be done. The Quarians had functional and highly effective frame armour for their Conclave Marines prior to the Geth War! In the military historical record, it is noted as their primary military advantage, and a necessary advantage given the complications a Quarian immune system brings to any off-world battlefield.

Most likely, the reason this fact has been forgotten has to do with the the related fact that the only reason their frames worked at all was that they were run entirely by onboard Geth processes. And as if that wasn't controversial enough, in their most significant military engagements these frame armours were then – of course – completely useless, as the Geth were purged from all their systems. It is estimated by some experts on the Geth War that if the Quarians had an alternative software system in place to run their frame armour, they might have been able to win the war.

Still, to my mind the primary lesson we can take from this bit of history is this: The only historically unsolved problem in frame armour development is the software problem.

The Geth were noted as being functionally 'merely' advanced VI as individual processes, and their sentience only emerged when enough of them shared processing power in a network. In their time, Geth were the most powerful VI architectures in the galaxy, a technological advantage the Quarians knew well to exploit, and one that they – thankfully, perhaps – kept to themselves, while the rest of the galaxy remained attached to multiple non-standardised VI architectures locked down by the patent monopolies of the primarily Asari corporations that owned them. This situation kept VI processing capacity well below what would have been needed to replicate the achievements of the Quarian in frame armour design.

But this situation has since changed dramatically, after the introduction of the human Systems Alliance. We humans brought with us the ASVIS, the Alliance Standard VI Structure, a VI architecture that was standardised throughout Alliance society and offered enormous improvements to the galactic standard. Within just a couple of decades, ASVIS and its direct derivatives had become the de-facto galactic standard VI architecture in both commercial and military applications. It is my strong conviction that ASVIS provides the missing piece required to recreate Quarian frame armour without the Geth.

I have put my money where my mouth is. As part of Close Corporation's supply agreement with the Alliance, we acquired from them the entirety of a shelved frame armour project, the Tx Project, and its latest T5 prototypes. For three years, I have been personally involved in the resurrection of this project, with the aim of overcoming the challenges that shelved this project in the first place. To round off this chapter, I want to detail some of those challenges and perhaps inspire some of you weapons-engineers-in-making to find ways to solve them.

 ** _Challenges of the T5 prototype_**

For the most part, the T5 was nearly combat-ready when the project was shelved after its first test deployments. An N7 operative who got to try it out in combat had referred to it in his after-action report as, and I quote:

"The fanciest coffin he had ever had the displeasure of trying on."

A scathing report, to be sure, and it is my understanding that the entire project was shelved almost entirely on the basis of that report. Perhaps annoyingly, the decision to shelve it was made by military brass before the reports were even considered by the engineers who had worked on it, so when the Close Corporation bought out the project we had to start by doing an engineering analysis of those same reports. An analysis that _should_ have been made before the brass had made their decision.

We identified many potential areas of improvement, but also found that only three things were needed to address the primary concerns of the testers. First, the suit needed a mass effect core system that was capable of differential compensation of inertia. That is, moving around in the suit felt a bit like having chains attached to your various joints, with the chains not pulling evenly at all when you try to move around. Moving your fingers could make moving the rest of your arm difficult, and vice versa, and bending at the elbow made your forearm feel like it was going to snap as it resisted the movement. This made all movements slow, unnatural, and deeply uncomfortable. We needed a mass effect core that could compensate for these effects.

Second, we needed to replace the purely mechanical joint actuators with 'soft' myomer-based versions. In physical terms, we needed to eliminate _jerk_ from the movements of the exoskeleton. Jerk is the difference between smooth dancing and doing the robot; jerk is the rate of change of acceleration, and it is _very_ noticeable to people who are used to the smooth movements of organic systems. In fact, jerk is observed as so contrary to organic motion that most of us have come to refer to jerky motion as 'robotic'. To the wearer of frame armour, this affects precision of movement, comfort, and coordination. It's the kind of thing that will always be very frustrating to a wearer, who will feel that their armour does not respond accurately to their movements.

Third, we would need to entirely replace the stiff midsection of the design with a more flexible armour design that allowed for more natural movements on the battlefield. While this would also reduce the wearer's protection in that area, it was vital to have natural motion of the lower back and hip in order to move around the battlefield in a somewhat natural way. In the original design, the frame armour was incapable of bending over, and had limited horizontal hip-twisting flexibility only allowing the wearer to turn their torso about 15 degrees at most. This was not only uncomfortable, it was severely limiting. And, notably from a commercial perspective, it would completely eliminate even the option of selling the system to a Batarian, due to their rigid and culturally important body posture system of body language.

Beyond those challenges, there were still further challenges in battlefield intelligence systems and onboard weapons systems, but we considered those to be more in the realm of experimentation and good-to-haves rather than being something that actually kept the system from being usable altogether, and we decided to focus on the necessities first to prove that we could actually field a frame armour that even an N7 would be comfortable wearing.

The first challenge proved to be the most complicated. We found that in order for a mass effect core to be capable of differentially affecting every part of the system at once, the core had to be about three times as big as we could feasibly integrate with an armour system. Clearly, we needed to approach the problem in a cleverer way. The solution came from a Quarian research engineer, who noted that resource strain aboard the flotilla meant that they had to be inventive with how they implemented mass effect cores in their industrial exoskeletons. Using a system of distributed micro-cores in the joints, salvaged from commercially available rifles, they were able to get away with a core that was much smaller than comparable systems elsewhere required. This also left more room for more advanced core control systems, making the overall system much more responsive and tunable.

We spent well over a year before we managed to develop a working prototype of just that concept alone, which illustrates the deceptive complexity of the matter. But, once we had that in place, we found that it gave us a head start for the second challenge of eliminating jerky motion. Having a more responsive core system alone alleviated some of the problem, but it was the distributed micro-core solution that proved the true hero here. These micro-cores could be integrated directly with the myomer actuators, improving their efficiency and dramatically reducing both the overall mechanical complexity and the weight of the exoskeleton.

The lessons we learned from solving that challenge made the third challenge much easier. Because of the way the micro-core distribution simplified the mechanics of the system, we were able to completely separate the upper and lower halves of the exoskeleton and graft them together with an entirely myomer-based middle section around the hip. This dramatically reduced the overall weight of the armour, made it much more user friendly, and still maintained the necessary structural strength required for the armour not to encumber the wearer. That it also reduced how much protection it offered was somewhat alleviated by additional space for added shield capacitors, and the ability to use whatever light armour plating you want. Terminus buyers could, theoretically, fit customised heavier armour plating to the midsection without entirely undoing the mobility advantage of this design.

Our current version of the armour, dubbed the T5-S Prototype Battlesuit, is not yet ready for production. It is currently being field-tested by the Alliance as part of our contract's development cooperation clause, and we expect the primary feedback to be that it needs further weapon systems enhancements to be worth the cost premium over standard armour, and even then it is only likely to see limited deployment due to the relative cost of it all. The market is risk averse: It is unlikely to take a chance on an unproven product, and as far as weapons systems go there are few that are more unproven than frame armour.

But I still consider the project well worth my money. Why? Because the project spawned multiple developments that have proved beneficial in other parts of the business. The development of the distributed micro-core system has allowed us to produce standard armour with partial myomer-based exoskeletal reinforcement, which reduces the strain on the wearer's joints and increases their endurance significantly. We've made strides in developing modular armour systems and standardised under-armour, which could prove a massive competitive advantage in the years to come. And a finer understanding of exactly how armour impedes motion, and what kinds of motion it impedes, has already allowed us to reduce the mobility penalty of our heavy armour solutions without reducing their protective efficiency.

We have also seen improvements in our integrations between weapons, armour, and battlefield intelligence systems, which has seen the recent release of a line of armour VI that significantly streamlines an operative's HUD and improves its capacity to filter out unnecessary information while highlight the most important information without being distractive. This is the first significant development in combat HUD systems in Citadel space in nearly two centuries, and already every major Council-member's military forces have contracted with us for integrating this technology with their own standards.

The takeaway from this, for an aspiring gunsmith, should be the following: Don't be afraid to chase ideas most would consider idiotic, if you believe yourself able to overcome the obstacles on the way. Even if you fail, the attempt is likely to result in useful lessons. But at the same time, you should never rely on these chases for success. Most will fail, and even when you do succeed, you likely still face an uphill battle commercialising it. One of my economics mentors once told me to never waste money I couldn't afford to waste. This is a universal truth.

* * *

...

Author's notes: I do not own Mass Effect.

So, much shorter than usual, but at least it's out quicker! I almost forgot I had promised a chapter on frame armour, even though I had it mostly written out. There are some hints here and there to KatKiller-V's Another Realm series, which is honestly the main reason this became its own chapter rather than just an aside on the T5 Battlesuit (T5-V in canon) in the Armour chapter.

His (or rather, Cieran's) use of frame armour in that story raises the question of why that wouldn't be commonplace across the galaxy if it's possible to do. I hope I have answered that here. Cieran himself also now prefer to go without, as once he reached a certain level of combat proficiency it became more of a hindrance than an advantage in most situations he found himself in. This comes down to the fundamental problems of frame armour, particularly of the type of design strategy he went for (the oversized, massively armoured kind). At least, that's what I think... :)

Next up will be some weapon case studies, I think. Kishock is probably first, I really like that weapon.


	10. Case study: The Kishock

**Case study: The Kishock sniper rifle**

 ** _History_**

The Kishock is a _very old design_. It is important to note this immediately whenever you set out to describe it and explain its history, because its age is both a remarkable testament to the brilliance of the design and an explanation for its most notable oddities, not all of which relate to the design itself. For example, the questions of who owns the design, who produces the rifles, and from whom you can buy it are all complicated by this very fact.

Originally, the Kishock – alternately spelled Kishok, depending on the whims of your translator – was designed by the master gunsmith of the Batarian House Kishock, in the very early days of post-first contact Hegemony, and first saw widespread use in the Omega-Khar'shan war where it proved surprisingly effective against Raik Vol's Krogan warriors.

During that time, the Hegemony's nationalised manufacturer Batarian State Arms 'acquired' the rights to the design, and the weapon went into mass production. In return, House Kishock gained hereditary rights to the position of Chief Gunsmith within BSA, although this agreement only lasted through two generations as all of House Kishock was eventually exiled from Hegemony space following a public feud with the Hegemon.

They, in turn, brought the design with them to Omega, where they made an important change to the base design: They replaced the original extrusion-based flash forge mechanism with an easier to produce slide track forge, which brought with it significant improvements that essentially made the BSA version immediately obsolete. The patent war that resulted when BSA promptly updated their own design accordingly is practically legendary among gunsmiths, and set a whole host of precedents – for better and/or for worse – for weapons patents in Council space.

It also firmly established, for the first time, the formal separation of the patent systems of Council space and the Terminus (or rather, the _lack of_ a patent system in the Termins). In fact, this was the first legal distinction ever made between the two regions of space. Until this decision, the Council had publicly held the Terminus to be a rebelling region formally – though not in any sense practically – under their authority. It is commonly believed that the Hegemony's part in forcing this legal distinction through their BSA lawsuits was a significant contributor to their accelerating decline in standing with the Council after that time.

The way these events affected the Kishock itself is also of great interest. For a brief period, there were two different 'standard' Kishock rifles you could buy, the Council edition and the Terminus edition. The Council one was, in actuality, the BSA's version of the rifle, which started out being nearly identical to the Terminus one. The main difference between the two was their price, with the BSA's economy of scale bringing production and distribution costs down. Over time, though, this picture changed significantly. In pace with the growing regulatory moves against the BSA, Council regulations forced sequential changes to the BSA version of the weapon over a period of about 200 years. During that time, in the late 1900s CE, BSA's patents on the Kishock also expired, but no one else attempted to push in on their market. That in itself should have been seen as a clear warning.

That warning was explained when the whole process concluded with the introduction of the Council Standard of Gun Regulation, which has been repeatedly noted as being interpretable as a wholesale ban on 'unique' Batarian designs such as the Kishock. Or rather, the first step to such a ban, as it would take some decades still before the gun rank model outlined in this document actually got tied into _law_. That happened in 2133, and was in effect an immediate ban on the sale of Kishock rifles in Council space as the requirements in the CSGR are wholly incompatible with the core design of the rifle.

It was also outlawed in practice, due to the previously mentioned inclusion of the Hegemony military in the rank 4-5 comparison chart, which required BSA rank 4 weapons to not outclass the Hegemony's average service weapons, which they did. The only way around that would have been a massive upgrade of every service weapon in the Hegemony, which they simply did not have anywhere near enough money to do.

Meanwhile, the independently produced Terminus variant continued to be produced and tinkered with, quickly surpassing the BSA's Council edition. By 2133, when BSA's Kishock market in Council space completely evaporated, their rifles were laughably underpowered and otherwise underperforming compared to the standard Terminus frame. Their only choice was to completely abandon their Council edition, and build a BSA-standard Terminus frame with which they could compete once more on cost.

In the current day, BSA-manufactured Kishock rifles are by a wide margin the most common throughout the Terminus, owing to the huge price difference and the relatively minor (and varying) differences in quality between it and the various independently produced variants. And even the BSA version retains the core thinking behind the Terminus frame's evolution: Simple construction, high reliability, easily modified, and broadly compatible with standard upgrades. This philosophy has had so long to establish itself – hundreds of years – that today, the Kishock rifle is almost universally the first weapon any Terminus gunsmith ever works on.

This is not to say that the Kishock is a particularly common weapon in the Terminus. It is still very much a weapon for the specially interested, for those who have taken a particular liking to it, and it is still significantly more expensive than most common handguns and basic rifle frames _because_ it is so relatively uncommon. Batarian State Arms like to boast that they are the single biggest arms manufacturer in the Terminus, but while this is true it also ignores the fact that they are the _only_ big arms manufacturer in a region whose arms are largely supplied by smaller, independent manufacturers and by pirates and PMCs bringing looted and adapted weapons in from Council space and the Traverse. All said, even as the biggest arms manufacturer they still control less than an estimated 3% of all arms trade in the region.

 ** _Technical history_**

The modern Kishock frame's basic design is barely changed since the introduction of the so-called 'Omega track' that simplified it. Though in the case of this particular rifle, talking about 'the frame' can be a bit deceptive. Hell, even the term 'rifle' can be seen as rather misleading. Ordinarily, the frame of a weapon is the 'box' within which its mechanism sits; the weapon as seen from outside. This is almost reversed with this rifle. The original Kishock had a half-open barrel resting on a single accelerator rail, as close to an eezo-assisted version of a crossbow as you could possibly get without an actual bow attached. It also lacked a stock, as most older Batarian weapons did.

Because of the strict rules on postures in Batarian culture, holding a proper shooting stance with a stock resting at your shoulder was seen as unacceptable. Instead, Batarian weapons generally used a system of – essentially – springs and counter-weights in a chamber underneath the barrel, which doubled as a vertical under-barrel grip. The sights, similarly, was offset to a side to avoid having to tilt your head too much when firing.

While this worked fairly well for the rigidly muscular Batarians, it didn't work at all for anyone else, and over time proved inferior to the stock model of rifle design, and the frame design was eventually changed bit by bit. The last major change to the frame itself, apart from material changes that aren't considered substantive, was the full-barrel design change, though the open barrel design remained a part of the Council edition until 2133.

Spotting the difference between a modern-day BSA variant and an independently produced one tends to be easy. The BSA prefers the old, Batarian organic and bulbous lines, whereas independent manufacturers tend to make them boxier, making more effective use of the frame's internal volume.

 ** _Mechanics and design_**

While most of the mechanics and design of the Kishock has already been covered in this book, it would be appropriate to collect the information in the case study. This section will _not_ comment on the aesthetic and outer-frame design of the weapon, simply because this is variable depending on manufacturer and generation.

The 'Harpoon Gun' is a simple construction, where most of the parts are interchangeable with a lot of common weapons. This is entirely by design, it is fundamental to what makes the weapon so easy to maintain and modify, and what makes it reliable. Most of its parts are proven elsewhere, and you can usually repair it easily by stripping down salvaged weapons on the battlefield. In fact, only two components of its internal mechanism is non-standard and unique to its design: The heat sink assembly, and the eezo core and core control assembly.

Its heat sink design, while primitive, bulky, and limited by the very simplicity of the weapon's design, still has standard heat sink self-repair functionality that has been tweaked over literally hundreds of years. While it is by no means the best heat sink in the industry, in fact it doesn't come anywhere close, it is _by far_ the most historically reliable one.

The weapon's other unique mechanism, its famously small and under-powered eezo core and its outdated core control assembly, are also similarly limited. Modern core controllers are significantly more complex than the one used in the Kishock, and generally require their own VI control systems separate from and slaved to the standard firing system VI. However, there are two limitations in this rifle that makes implementing a modern solution practically challenging: The inflexible heat sink and how it integrates with the controller, and the technical complications inherent to integrating a modern, complex core-controller system with a simple, slap-together design which fundamentally requires a simplistic, broad-tolerance core-controller.

To try to put that more simply, the current core-controller system requires almost no complex integration with the various components of the weapon, relying on a simple static schematic supplied by the firing system VI (hosted on the integrated disassembled omni-tool) in conjunction with mass interference readings from the core. By contrast, a modern system would require integration of a sensor net, dynamic schematic generation, and completely changing the barrel assembly to support the improved synchronisation with and cycling of the core. And that's before you start to consider how to fit all that in around the heat sink, and how you can find an eezo core that is small enough to fit but still powerful enough to make it all worth the effort.

Then there is also the matter of integrating and synchronising all this with the power systems, probably the most often-switched part of a Kishock rifle, as one usually has to change or at least modify the power supply system whenever the weapon is modified in any way. It is my view that even if the most significant problem with the modern Kishock – the heat sink – was solved, it is unlikely that the eezo core issue will ever be solved without a complete redesign that goes away from the core philosophies of the weapon, and I am uncertain how desirable such a change would be.

Obviously, the true _core_ of the Kishock is what replaces the expected ammo block, shaver, loading chamber, waste barrel, and firing control VI assembly: The disassembled omni-tool. The weapon can take literally any omni-tool when it is disassembled, and the entire process of upgrading from one tool to a newer one generally takes less than twenty minutes, with most of that time taken up by the disassembly process. The only challenging part is remembering to remove the micro-fabricator from the omni-tool, as the Kishock only requires the flash forge for its fabrication needs.

The key to the rifle's operation is the installation and alignment of the flash forge on a manually operated rail system. All of the control software for this is entirely standardised and installed in seconds on any standard omni-tool, so the only difficulty involved in this process is in deconstructing the parts of the forge and aligning them properly on the slide track, and in turn aligning this assembly properly within the barrel assembly. It is not a difficult job, but it does require some care to do get right and should not be attempted without training.

Many of my apprentices have been surprised to learn that integrating the omni-tool's control systems into the weapon's mechanisms is _not_ a challenging job at all. In fact, it is straightforward enough that anyone can do it with a minimal amount of instruction. Once the right software is installed and activated on the omni-tool, and the tool has been locked into remote pairing mode, it is simply a matter of locking it in its dedicated place in the frame and flipping four switches: Core control, power, barrel, and heat. These are the only four control interfaces needed.

On some models, particularly those used by more experienced Terminus operators, there is a fifth switch as well: The hardline lock. This comes down to the prevailing paranoia in Terminus space regarding wireless access to onboard weapons systems. Normally, the integration architecture of the Kishock is seen as a sufficient bulwark against electronic warfare, but some don't want _any_ wireless data connectivity, not even strictly one-way diagnostic data or single-device physically paired connections. For these people, the hardline lock is the necessary function that shuts down all wireless connectivity with the onboard omni-tool and replaces it with a wired interface accessible from a port on the frame, usually co-located with the HUD connections on the sights.

A popular modification among skilled users of the weapon is the reintegration of the micro-fabricator into the process, usually for purposes of ammo modification. Currently, on Omega, the most popular ammo modification for the Kishock – somewhat absurdly, in my view – is a variation of the high-explosive bolt. The mechanics of this mod are easily explained: The micro-fabricator constructs a detonator mechanism and a series of small explosives on a thin wire. The flash forge then forges the bolt around this wire, with the detonator at the base. The bolt itself has a cellular composition, each cell filled with a pressurised, stable liquid explosive. When fired, the bolt flies as normal. On impact, the shock travels along the internal structure of the bolt until it reaches the detonator, which triggers the charges along the wire, which in turn ignites the liquid explosive.

I call this absurd, because it reduces the damage output of the weapon and ignores its primary benefit: The penetration and "bleed effect" of the bolt. In effect, it completely changes how the weapon is used from a single-target, high-damage typical sniper rifle profile, to a crowd control weapon, where its competition makes it relatively useless. If you want to control crowds, you don't want a single-shot weapon, but a rapid-fire, wide area-of-effect weapon. Something like the Krogan Striker, to point at a very obvious but in many ways equally flawed example.

 ** _Specifications_**

 _Fire type: Charged; single action_

Owing to its underpowered mass effect core, and the outdated core controls that come with it, the Kishock is unable to cycle its mass effects fields fast enough to keep up with its flash forge. As a result, firing is a staged process. First, you load the weapon with a cocking motion, which track-forges the large projectile. Then, you hold down the trigger to cycle the mass effect field, lowering the mass of the projectile as per standard mass effect weapon operation. Then, you release the trigger to actually fire the weapon once the mass effect field has been fully (or even partially) applied.

Some variants of the weapon use a two-stage trigger press mechanism instead, where pulling on the trigger cycles the core and pulling it all the way fires. However, this is a very rare design, as most snipers and marksmen will prefer the trigger-release firing method as it improves firing accuracy.

The Kishock can be fired without cycling the mass effect core, which allows much more rapid fire. This severely underpowers the weapon and massively decreases its range, reducing it to a ballistic trajectory, but it is still devastating against unshielded and unarmoured targets, which is one of the reasons the rifle is particularly feared by slaves and colonists who might be targeted for slavery by Batarian pirates.

 _WDAH rating: 6 – 8 – 10 – 1_

The WDAH rating system is common among gunsmiths, and throughout the Terminus. WDAH stands for Weight – Damage – Accuracy – Heat, and is a four-part 10 point scale ranking. Note that WDAH is relative to category always, and different factors per part. For example: a 7D pistol does NOT have the same damage output as a 7D sniper rifle, nor is a 7W pistol the same weight as a 7W sniper rifle.

The reason why a system of relative measurements is adopted is because it completely avoids conversion issues between the different systems of measurements used by different species and nations. Additionally, a WDAH rating is always given at a specific time, which makes it directly comparable to other weapons at that same time, and means you can easily compare weapons from different time periods by comparing the specific technical detail of the reference weapons for each category.

The other rating system that is often used is WCFDA: Weight, capacity, fire rate, damage, and accuracy. However, while resellers and consumers tend to prefer this scheme, most gunsmiths dislike it because it is fundamentally misleading and poorly defined. For example, what is the fire rate of the Kishock? Are we counting charged or uncharged shots? What about partially charged shots? And what does the Capacity factor actually reflect? The overall heat capacity of the heatsink, or the thermal dissipation capacity of the weapon? These numbers can be very different!

Going back to the Kishock, its WDAH weight rating of 6 indicates that in its standard BSA frame it is very much a middle-of-the-road option as far as weight go in sniper rifles, weighing slightly more than half the difference in weight between the lightest reference sniper rifle – the semi-automatic M-97 Viper – and the heaviest reference, the legendary M-98 Widow.

Its damage rating of 8 places it close to the Widow on a scale between it and the M-13 Raptor marksman rifle. Its accuracy rating of 10 places it on par with the Viper as the most accurate sniper rifle in the reference tables, though it should be noted that this is _specifically_ for charged shots. Unpowered, the rifle rates a mere 4.

Finally, the heat rating places it dead last for heat management in the WDAH rating tables, making it the low-bar reference for heat. In WDAH, this factor is a composite of heat production, heat capacity, and thermal dissipation. It scores poorly across the board, with extremely high heat production, very low heat capacity, and a structurally obsolete thermal dissipation design that alone would place it at the bottom of the range.

This is where the it suffers most compared to modern day weapons, as its heat production has had to increase to keep pace with the damage output of comparable weapons, while its capacity for getting rid of the heat has been stagnant for many decades already. While this has made many doubt its continued existence as a viable weapon in the future, I have my doubts. The Kishock remains a favourite of gunsmiths across the galaxy, and they are all likely to try every possible option to address the issue. Perhaps its salvation will be the introduction of a viable heatsink cycling system, should that particular pipedream ever come to fruition.

 ** _Summary_**

I dare say that no other weapon carries as much historical import as the simple Kishock sniper rifle. When it was introduced, it was something entirely unique, and where most unique products in established markets tend to fade away quickly, the Kishock has survived for hundreds of years as a frontline weapon still in active service. No other weapon even comes close to this kind of pedigree. It was once pointed out to me that even ceremonial swords, regardless of species and culture, undergo more significant design and material changes than this rifle on much shorter timescales.

The only weapon that is ever sometimes brought up as a potential challenger is the Krogan Graal shotgun, a weapon whose core modern-day design feature is lifted _directly_ from the Kishock.

* * *

...

 **Author's notes: I do not own Mass Effect.**

What's this, _another_ update? o_O

Yeah, the Kishock write-up is one I've had mostly ready for months and months. So this shouldn't be all that surprising :)

I had some more stuff on it, but I've managed to lose it... I might add it in later, if I recall it was about how easy it is to modify and some common modifications. Anyway, as you might notice, this is still the Kishock _pre-thermal clip system_. This is not the same weapon you're used to from the game, but it _is_ the same weapon frame. If you had access to this weapon in ME1, it would basically behave like the rail extension + HE rounds sniper rifles, overheating with every shot and taking _ages_ to cool down again. The idea is that the thermal clip system was a specifically enabling technology for this weapon, making it competitive again by solving the heat management issue.


	11. Case study: The Graal Spike Thrower

**Case study: The Graal Spike Thrower**

 ** _History_**

In some ways, the Graal shotgun – under a liberal application of the definition of a 'shotgun' – is a significantly older weapon than even the Kishock. With origins that supposedly pre-date the nuclear holocaust of Tuchanka, if you accept that the weapon today is essentially the same design as it was back then, it can certainly compete for historical pedigree with the Kishock.

However, accepting that proposition would betray a fundamental ignorance about the weapon's history and how its current-day version compares to its historical ancestors. The modern Graal is _very, very_ different from its origins in every way, including its design. Only the basic concept remains unchanged: A shotgun that fires large spikes – flechettes, technically – out of multiple barrels to deal massive damage from impact and bleed.

It is a weapon of unparalleled brutality, and while many would suggest that all you need to know to understand that brutality is the fact that it is a _Krogan design_ , I think that's extremely unfair and fundamentally false. Historically, Krogan designs have indeed shown a preference for brutal efficiency, but the Graal technically goes against that. Specifically, while brutal, it is – or rather was – anything but efficient.

The weapon was heavy, slow to reload, ineffective against shields, harder to adjust to counter developments in armour technology than its contemporaries, difficult to maintain, and generally unreliable due to its bespoke nature. The last one is particular is important to keep in mind: The Graal, historically, was a weapon of great cultural significance, and each clan had its own unique base design which was used as a basis for bespoke weapons created for each individual warrior. Thus, very rarely were you able to use parts from one Graal to fix another, and whether you could use ammunition from one weapon in another depended on the two weapons being made for the same clan.

This was by no means effective. In fact, it sounds like a ludicrous design for any weapon of war, so the question is begged: Why has this weapon been kept around for so long?

To understand this, you need to consider why it was first invented, which involves discussing parts of Krogan history that is rarely if ever discussed outside of Tuchanka, and almost never outside of Krogan society. In researching this weapon, I personally met with and talked at length with several Shamans, the historians and loremasters of Krogan society. The story I managed to piece together from these talks is fascinating.

The Graal was not invented as a weapon of war. It was, and still remains, a hunting weapon and a tool for self-defense specifically designed to meet the rather special requirements of the Krogan home world of Tuchanka. Specifically, the Graal was used to kill Thresher Maws, beasts native to the Tuchankan wastelands which historically would actively hunt Krogan who wandered into their territories (or whose territories happened to be where the Thresher Maw had decided to establish itself). At this, it proved so exceptionally effective that some of the Shamans suggested the weapon almost single-handedly had kept the Krogan population from dropping below sustainable levels during Tuchankas nuclear winter.

This explains its cultural significance and thus its staying power, despite how overtly ineffective the weapon always was as a weapon of war. But it does not explain its current use and popularity. For that, we need to look at more recent history. Specifically, we need to look to Warlord Raik Vol of Omega, who is rumoured to have been the first to replace the old manually loaded metal spike loading mechanism with a disassembled omni-tool. This is the first example of this particular design feature in any public record.

Even since then, however, the weapon has never been officially mass produced. Not even Raik Vol himself allowed his own design to enter into mass production for his own troops. Today still, every Graal you see – barring a few largely-unsuccessful attempts at small-scale mass production – are unique to specific clans, and made to order for a single warrior.

There is still great variation in Graal designs. Krogan gunsmiths haven't even been able to decide whether to standardise around a slide-track omni-forge like the Kishock's, or to stick with the standard extrusion forges. Some variants use a long-barrel design with multiple hyper-cycled forges that forge spikes for each barrel. Others use a barrel compartmentalisation system, where only the end of the barrel has acceleration rails and the rest of their length functions as the 'clip'. Each variant has unique mechanics with advantages and disadvantages, and disagreements are great within the clans and between gunsmiths about which is superior.

It should probably be noted that the name 'Graal' is actually fairly recent. The weapons have had multiple names over the centuries they've been in use, reflecting the differences between them. It has always had a somewhat similar, very Krogan 'look' to it: Large, bulky, a giant grip, an oversized waste barrel optimised for Carnage protocol, little thought put into elegantly fitting in its necessary components. Still, as far as Krogan weapons go it is one of the more refined frames, after centuries of adjustments. For example, it lost its side-mounted ammo block-and-shaver assembly even before Vol redesigned the weapon to replace its mechanism with an omni-tool. This puts it apart from other Krogan shotguns, where despite the impracticality of the placement the Krogan see it is a good enough compromise that allows them to use more powerful accelerator rails and larger-caliber shavers without forcing the barrel too far off from the trigger or unnecessary lengthening the weapon, making it more unwieldy as a shotgun.

The design change that enabled this set a precedent for the design of other Krogan weapons, such as the fearsome Striker (the design of which is directly based on the Graal). The block-and-shaver assembly was placed in the stock, with separate feeds for the main and waste barriels, and with the recoil dampeners being moved forward in front of the trigger assembly. In order not to reduce the effectiveness of said dampeners due to the reduced space in the frame for them, the dampeners were angled to directly counteract the vertical recoil more than the horizontal. For a Krogan, this was not a problem. For anyone else, this meant that firing the weapon would shatter their shoulder at best and tear their arm off at worst.

Some may be surprised that the Graal ever had an ammo shaver at all, considering the size of its flechettes. And it is a bit of a cheat to consider it that. The ammo blocks in the old models consisted of pre-forged flechettes stacked in a near-solid block. The 'ammo shaver' was a mechanism that separated the individual flechettes from the stack This design change is still seen today, with the stock being where the omni-gel repository is located, and the forges being on the ends of the barrel feeds, though some of the recoil dampeners have also returned.

The future of the weapon is an interesting thing to speculate on. While the weapon is doubtlessly one of the most powerful shotguns out there – realistically only beaten by the Claymore – it has two major problems that hinder its popularity. First, its heterogenous design means it is a nightmare to maintain and a logistical nightmare in combat situations outside of the Blood Pack and Krogan clan warfare. Second, the weapon requires an absolutely massive and extremely heavy heatsink, making it wildly impractical for non-Krogan even before you try to fire it and it rips your arm off.

Now, this is where I do some reasoned speculation. Both of those problems could be addressed by a single change, which many have believed for decades would come about eventually: Disposable heatsinks. It has long been known that there is significant theoretical potential for performance and combat effectiveness improvements in the concept of replacing static, self-repairing reusable heatsinks with disposable heatsinks, 'thermal clips' if you will. It is known that gunsmiths and arms manufacturers around the galaxy have worked on different implementations of this concept for a long time, but no consumer-viable option has ever been marketed. If this _were_ to happen, however, the change would bring a lot of changes to weapons everywhere, in part because it would cause the complete collapse of the current intellectual property regime around arms designs centred on the Council Standard model as the redesigns would circumvent the existing patents.

More interestingly for the Graal, though, is that it would enable exactly the kinds of changes to its internals that would make it broadly viable. Based on conservative models of thermal clip efficiency compared to that of the static heatsink, we would be able to reduce the weight of the weapon by about 80% just from reducing the size and complexity of the heatsink. This would also allow a reduction in frame size to make it more manageable for non-Krogan, and it would allow more recoil dampening, all without any reduction in output force.

I really like the Graal as a weapon, and I do wish that this does happen someday. But I am in no way certain that it will.

 ** _Technical history_**

Since the Graal's technical history is pretty much the history of its technical development, there isn't much else to mention here, apart from a few minor interesting details.

The Vol-frame Graal – the original omni-tool based design – is still the most popular 'variant' of the weapon, with its six long barrels sitting ahead of four hypercycled forges in extrusion mode directly above the trigger mechanism. Similarly to the Kishock, the Graal has a charging mechanism that increases the force of the shot. Unlike the Kishock, this is not because of an underpowered mass effect core. The weapon has multiple accelerator rails surrounding its six barrels, that are arranged around two accelerator _rods_. These rods are essentially multidirectional accelerator rails on steroids.

Where the Kishock is unable to provide enough acceleration to its heavy projectiles to be particularly effective, the Graal has more than sufficient juice to do so even without charging. However, doing so only uses the regular rails. It is the rods that require charging. As a bonus, the extra time required for the charge allows the mass effect core to further reduce the mass of the flechettes, which further ramps up the muzzle velocity. A variable in the design, the charge-up time is usually between .5 and 1 seconds, with the increase in muzzle velocity equivalent to a damage increase of between 50% and 100% (depending, of course and in part, on the target profile).

A less popular but still quite widespread design uses smaller accelerator rods that are also much shorter, and more but shorter accelerator rails around the last third of the same barrel length. The rest of the barrel is effectively used as a 'clip', holding ready-made flechettes for quick firing. Predictably, the damage output from this variant is only about a third that of the Vol-frame, but in terms of damage over time it may well be significantly higher, as the weapon is capable of firing 10x6 flechettes at full charge within five seconds before overheating. At sustainable heat production, it can fire about once every two seconds at full charge until it runs out of omni-gel.

Most gunsmiths familiar with the Graal believe that if the design were to be standardised, the Vol-frame would become the basis of the weapon. Not because it is necessarily superior in combat – that is highly debatable – but simply because it has proven more reliable, and because of its historical pedigree. However, everyone agrees that for standardisation to happen, the extrusion forges have to be replaced with slide track forges, likely using the weapon's recoil to run the forge down the track similarly to ancient self-loading gun mechanisms.

 ** _Mechanics and design_**

Again, the Graal is a hard weapon to pin down specifications for due to its many variations, but here is a generalised summary:

The weapon is a bespoke, non-standardised frame, making maintenance and combat logistics a challenge. It fires flechettes that slice through thick armour like it was butter, giving it a huge advantage in armour-heavy Terminus combat. These flechettes are flash forged from omni-gel using an integrated disassembled omni-tool, though the integration is much less sophisticated than with the Kishock, and there is no agreed standard forge mechanism or specification.

The weapon has six barrels, significantly longer than most shotgun barrels. Some variants use much of the barrel space to store flechettes for faster firing. The barrels and firing rails are fully encased in a massive, heavy, old-fashioned heatsink that makes the weapon too heavy to use for anyone who isn't Krogan. In order to keep the recoil controllable – which with this weapon would be a problem even for the Krogan – the weapons use a relatively sophisticated recoil dampening system with angled inertial absorbers. This system is one of very few mechanisms that are generally standardised across all Graal weapons.

Its fire control VI system is primitive at best, with no option for wireless access. This is less of an intended design feature and more of a consequence of the haphazard integration of the omni-tool in the Graal's design. Since so little about the weapon is standardised, you can't easily take the Kishock route of making the right omni-tool software available on the Extranet to make it 'plug and play'. Every omni-tool you install has to be customised for the individual weapon, which means Krogan gunsmiths have made an effort to reduce the complexity of that customisation. Which means cutting away every possible 'advanced' feature, leaving a bare-bones solution that is as simple as possible to customise and maintain.

There are too many variations in the mechanics and design to fully cover them. Every Graal you come across will require its own investigation and spec sheet, unless the weapon is somehow standardised at some point in the future. And make no mistake, you _will_ be required to work with this weapon if you ever work as a gunsmith in the Terminus or Traverse. While the gun is outlawed in Council space, it is quite common in those regions, and while it is exclusively Krogan-made and -used, the Krogan are not hesitant to hand them over to qualified gunsmiths of other races to fix, customise, or simply maintain them.

 ** _Specifications_**

 _Fire type: Charged, semi-automatic_

 _Fire rate capacity: 0.5-2 shots/sec charged, 1-4 shots/sec uncharged (variant dependant)_

The weapon can be fired as quickly as the flash forges allow, which can be as quick as twice per second or as slow as once per second. Heat-sustainable firing is much slower. The Graal usually employs a two-stage trigger mechanism, rather than a trigger-release system like the Kishock.

As an aside, it is also interesting to note that the base designs of the Graal do not have secondary barrels. Neither does, as you might notice, the Kishock. The reason is obvious enough: Projectile forging does not generate waste material in the same way that ammo shavers do. Thus, a waste barrel is unnecessary. However, some add one or two 'secondary' barrel(s) to the Graal in order to make the weapon compatible with Carnage shots. This isn't technically necessary, as you could generate Carnage rounds in the normal barrels easily enough, but doing so risks screwing up the flash forge alignment with the barrels. Those who go the secondary barrel route tend to use the microfabricator of the integrated omni-tool to fabricate the rounds.

 _WDAH rating: 10 – 9 – 7 – 5_

While the Graal and the Claymore are not of equal weight, they _are_ both much, much heavier than any other shotgun on the market, so much so that using the heaviest of the two (the Claymore) as a reference would make little sense as none of the other shotguns besides the Graal would rate higher than 4. Therefore, the two are rated as 10 by default, with the Graal as the reference. Behind it comes the Crusader, rated 8.

The damage rating of 9 is its charged damage, though many see it as misleading. While the M-300 Claymore is indeed more powerful, armour effectively mitigates its damage output even when armour-piercing modifications are used. The Graal, on the other hand, effectively _ignores_ armour, and given that both weapons are most commonly used in the Terminus – where heavy armour is standard gear – most consider the Graal to _effectively_ have a higher damage output than the Claymore. It is a debatable point worth mentioning, but the Vol-frame Graal is still officially rated at around 9D on WDAH.

Among shotguns, the Graal is one of the more accurate guns out there. Its flechettes fly straight, and the long barrels of the Vol-frame combined with the aerodynamics of the flechettes means they maintain accurate trajectories over significant distances compared to most other shotguns. The high reference here is, of course, the Crusader, which of course is banned from use in Council space even by the Alliance's N7.

Finally, its middle-of-the-road heat rating of 5 indicates that its heat sink is capable of effectively handling the heat production of the weapon such that continuous fire is possible, but limited.

 ** _Summary_**

To my mind, few weapons represent so much wasted potential as the Graal 'Spike Thrower'. That it is only usable by the Krogan is one thing; we would need significant developments in heat management technology to do anything about that. But it is a weapon that has the potential to be thoroughly impressive, a powerful force on the battlefield, a weapon that shift the balance of warfare, and it wastes this potential. It wastes it by evading standardisation, through clan-based traditions taking precedence to good arms design and engineering. Its major weakness is that it is a logistical nightmare, which means that even mercenaries who love it usually end up using other weapons in longer engagements because they can't maintain it effectively outside of their clan.

Should its major challenges ever be overcome, it could become a very competitive weapon indeed.

* * *

...

 **Author's notes: I do not own Mass Effect.**

So, if it wasn't clear before, my approach to the narrative elements of things is to be _canon compliant_ , but not canon _restricted._ That is, I'll expand on canon, and change things around, but I won't violate the fundamentals beyond what my changes allow naturally. In this case, that means coming up with some kind of interesting history behind the Graal that isn't contradicted by canon.

And remember, this is written in-character, _before_ the introduction of thermal clips (before the events of Mass Effect 1, actually). This is not the Graal you know from the game. I also fear it's a bit of a mess... my mind is slightly shattered at the moment, doing _a ton_ of writing (and not the fun kind) for work these days.

Let me know what you think! And just to note, if you spot any potential errors, let me know so I can address them. I want this sidefic to be a reference, and as such I want it to be as accurate as I can make it.


	12. Case study: The Avenger frame

**Case study: The Avenger frame**

This chapter is an odd one. The so-called 'Avenger frame' – sometimes inaccurately referred to as the 'Avenger series' – is not so much a weapon as it is a particular assault rifle design framework, and it is something as unusual as a design framework that is not patent protected, partially explaining its ubiquity.

 ** _History_**

To understand the significance and the concept of the Avenger frame, one must understand the history of it. Fortunately, that history is fairly short on a galactic timescale. Arguably, the first Avenger frame weapon was the M-7 Lancer rifle, the Systems Alliance's standard field rifle for two decades before and immediately after the First Contact War. The Lancer was the third generation mass effect-assisted assault rifle fielded by the Alliance, and by far the longest-lived. It is a fairly vanilla construction, and quite bulky by the Council standards of the day, but during the First Contact War it proved itself in battle as a very reliable, low-maintenance, high-capacity, high-stability, fairly accurate assault rifle. Most notably, it was absolutely ubiquitous: Every Alliance soldier had one, they all knew how to use it, they all knew how to repair and maintain them, and how to tune them to their preferred specifications.

Compare this to the Turian model for standard weaponry, where every unit fields different weapons based on their specialities and tactical purposes. The human history of warfare has taught us how logistics can influence outcomes, and in the FCW it allowed the Alliance to push back the numerically and technologically superior Turians in multiple victories on the ground. The FCW brought about many changes to established Hierarchy military doctrine, and rightly so, but of those changes the new analysis of their logistical approach was probably the most significant.

This caught the attention of gunsmiths across the galaxy. What was this gun that made the _Turians_ change their basic approach to their military's standard weapons? Now, historically there has been a trend where new species are discovered, and for a brief time thereafter most new weapons developed will have clear influences from the weaponry of that new species. But not since the Turians has this influence been so strong as with the human M-7 Lancer.

Arms manufacturers were soon in a race to develop and manufacture their own versions of the weapon, to compete with human manufacturers – particularly Hahne-Kedar – who were flooding the market with the already mass-produced Lancer. They soon discovered that the Systems Alliance had a policy of refusing to purchase patent-protected equipment in bulk, which meant that the entire construction of the Lancer was unpatented, and unprotected. Because most other successful frames _are_ patented, that would open up entirely new markets for a lot of manufacturers. Within just a few years, nearly all new assault rifles in Council space were built around the basic Lancer frame, with minor variations. Then Elkoss Combine developed a cheaper and more flexible variation on the rifle that they dubbed the Avenger.

The Avenger solved a few issues with the Lancer frame. Namely, it took away the dependence on human-manufactured components such as a complicated and fairly expensive ammo shaver based around the concept of mass effect field intersection shearing. This shaver was very precise and very fast, and had very low heat generation, but it was also expensive and required a miniaturised integrated mass effect field generator, whereas most modern shavers use the rifle's main generator. Elkoss Combine's design changes allowed them to use two common pistol ammo shavers operating in tandem, which lowered cost without significantly lowering performance.

Crucially, none of the changes EC did were patentable. At the time, it was well-known that the Alliance was looking to replace the aging Lancers, and that they preferred an iterative design change. That is, they wanted a modernisation of the Lancer frame, rather than an entirely new weapon. So over the next few years, many minor changes were made to the various Lancer-frame weapons by various manufacturers. Over time, they changed enough that the frame was renamed to the 'Avenger frame', as Elkoss Combine had been first to make any significant changes. It also made licensing matters easier, as manufacturers discovered that they could attach their Avenger frame variations onto the same CSGR licenses and ranks. Compliance to the Avenger frame standards became a legal shortcut to licensing, dramatically lowering manufacturer cost, effort, and time-to-market.

All of this, when considered together, explains why nearly all assault rifles you see in Council space these days look nearly identical. As explained in previous chapters, manufacturers are largely unwilling to take chances on unproven designs, and all proven designs are quickly patented and locked to single manufacturers or licensed to a few. The arrival of the Avenger frame changed the game, with the internal mechanisms still largely patented but the frame and build proven and mostly license-free. This caused a drop in weapon prices, as well as a homogenisation of popular designs. Of course, the moment you cross the border into the Traverse and the Terminus, said homogenisation disappears.

Until fairly recently, the Alliance had been slowly phasing out the M7 Lancers in favour of a variety of Avenger-frame weapons across different branches to test the various models. The Marines had been assigned Hahne-Kedar's updated Lancer model, which by some metrics was a step _down_ from the M7 model. It wasn't as hard-hitting, it had lower capacity, but it was significantly cheaper and just as reliable. More importantly, it was CSGR compliant, unlike the M7 which was designed and fielded before the First Contact War.

After my company bought out Hahne-Kedar, the first item on our agenda was to re-do that project. Renaming the rifle Avenger A2, we incorporated a wide range of the improvements that other manufacturers had made to the Avenger frame over the years, and added some of our own. To avoid trademark infringement litigation, we signed a manufacturing arrangement with Elkoss-Combine for the civilian A3 model. As we now had the infrastructure in place to manufacture a superior replacement for the Lancer at a cheaper price point than any competitor could even approach, we quickly got the deal with the Alliance to supply them with the Avenger A2 as the new standard assault rifle. Work is ongoing to formalise the spec for the M8 designation, which is set to be completed within two years.

 ** _Close Corporation Avenger models_**

Close Corporation currently markets two different Avenger frame rifles: The mil-spec A2 model and the civilian A3 model. In terms of ranks, the A3 covers ranks 1-4 in the licensing scheme, but are sold in seven ranks (I-VII). The A2 model covers ranks 4-10, but are sold in ten ranks (I-X). As I have said previously: Give up trying to understand the Council rank model, you're not training to be a lawyer or salesman, you are training to be a gunsmith.

In simple terms, both models are licensed together on one rank scale where capabilities are rated against the Avenger Ax IV variant (the lowest available mil-spec edition of the licensed Avenger Ax model), and are sold separately on another (where capabilities are ranked relative to the model's own base spec, that is A2 I and A3 I). So, The Avenger Ax IV is the same as the Avenger A2 I.

The aim of the Avenger Ax project was to create a mil-spec variant of the Avenger frame that would be a true step up, rather than a step down, from the M7 model. We wanted to be the only real contender for the M8 specification, and we achieved this. The Alliance's demands for this were as straightforward as they were difficult to meet: Improvements to every key metric (WDAH), no reductions in reliability, lower material cost, lower maintenance and logistics cost, improved modification flexibility, and adherence to Council regulations for mil-spec weapons, as well as to Systems Alliance military regulations.

This proved to be an extremely challenging task, and it took us the better part of three years to succeed. Certain features of the Lancer that were not CSGR-compliant were directly responsible for its high performance. It was constructed on a framework that, while logical and perfectly acceptable at the time, came in conflict with the Council legal concept of _material capability_. Specifically, it was impossible to construct a Lancer model with lower material capability than the baseline mil-spec model, in part because the basic mil-spec model was the _only_ model, but also because – according to the CSGR – the weapon had internal variability in material capability. Yes, I am aware that this makes no sense. As I have repeatedly stated: Do not try to understand the rank model. The idea of material capability is one you will eventually learn through practice and experience, but few ever get to a point where they are able to _explain_ it in terms understandable to a non-lawyer.

Attempts by previous contractors to compete for the M8 had been based on the M7, but our first crucial insight was to use the M7 as a relative measure only and go back to the drawing board. We started by designing a bare-bones Avenger frame, as stripped as possible, to use as a baseline. Comparing its performance to the M7 gave us clear targets to work toward, and showed us that we had a lot of development to do. Here are some of the engineering accomplishments and changes that went into the weapon: Changing the ammo block to a common Council standard size, manufacturable with an omni-tool; switching to Elkoss-Combine's ammo shaver assembly, but using better materials and improving the integration between the two shavers; developing a switchable pseudo-permanent magnetic grain filter, simplifying the sorting of ammo from waste, freeing up a lot of space in the frame, and reducing heat production; and developing a serial-cyclical accelerator rail, which increased the rate of fire with a minimal increase in heat production.

We also designed a parallel loading chamber mechanism, which provided improvements to heat management, better performance to the barrel feed which supported the higher RoF, and increased reliability by lowering component stress and providing some redundancy. This also allowed us to use cheaper components without lowering performance. This feature is only available in the mil-spec variant.

And, finally, we redesigned the heat sink assembly from the ground up once most of the spec was finished. This proved to be the greatest challenge, since even with the space we had managed to free up, getting the heat sink to handle enough heat to get up to the necessary M8 specification ranges proved quite challenging. Nearly 20 months of the development of the weapon was purely an exercise in development of the heat sink assembly, and systems related to it.

Some unusual features were copied from popular modifications to the Lancer, such as a mechanism for automatic adjustment of the distance between the ammo block and the ammo shaver. Waste from the ammo shaving process causes irregularities in the ammo block which can ultimately result in the weapon jamming as the ammo shaver becomes misaligned with the block. Theoretically, the automated adjustment system increases the overall complexity such that it becomes _on paper_ less reliable overall, but we know historically that this isn't the case in practice. Still, the Alliance rejected this particular design on this basis, and as a result it is a feature that is only available in the civilian A3 model.

 **Specification**

Since the Avenger frame is not a specific weapon, but rather a broad group of weapons sharing certain design characteristics, it would be difficult to give a workable specification here. WDAH ratings for Avenger frames range from 2 to 9 in all categories. Therefore, I will here cover two specific Avenger frame assault rifles: The Avenger A2, included here as a reasonable mil-spec baseline, and the Spectre-grade HMWA Mk X 'Master Gear' line assault rifle.

 ** _Avenger A2_**

 _Fire type: Switchable; semi-automatic, four-round burst, full auto_

Switchable fire modes was given as a desired feature for the M8 model rifle, though few of our competitors even made the attempt to implement it. Fact is, the going sentiment in military circles is that the modern assault rifle has made switchable fire modes an obsolete relic of the past. Not really because it wouldn't be practical anymore, more because actually implementing it is… difficult.

Modern weapons are complicated mechanisms that are fine-tuned for their role. The optimal performance settings and calibrations for a semi-automatic DMR are _very_ different than for a regular rifleman's full-auto assault rifle. Thus, switching from one firemode to another either means switching to a sub-optimal setting, or engaging a complicated series of automated recalibrations. It's a daunting engineering challenge, especially if you're working within strict requirements for reliability, but my team and I still decided that we would attempt to develop such a system.

We succeeded: The production rifle has a delay of less than a second on switching firing modes, despite the switch setting in motion a fairly complex series of internal adjustments. Semi-auto mode overcharges the acceleration rails, constricts the barrel and narrows the confinement tunnel generated by the guide rails. It also slightly increases the grain size on the shaver. This results in a significant increase in the Damage metric in WDAH, which highlights a problem with the rating system: It assumes a single firing mode (charge-weapons notwithstanding).

 _WDAH rating: 4 – 5 – 5 – 8_

It is for this reason that the WDAH for the A2 is given based on its full-auto performance. To be more specific, the Damage rating is 5 at full auto, 7 in burst mode, and 9 in semi-auto mode. Again, these ratings are relative to other licensed assault rifles on the market. Even on semi-auto mode, the A2 does not come close to the weakest mil-spec long rifle on the market. It is not competitive in a sniper role, but that was never the intention. The switchable fire modes gives the rifle better flexibility in the field, which reduces the logistical requirements on the Alliance as there is less of a need for specialised weaponry for the bulk of their forces.

Its accuracy ratings are 5 – 5 – 7. Now that may seem like a strange spread, but it has to do with how accuracy is measured: Single shot in the active firing mode. On full-auto, the A2 is calibrated to _maintain_ accuracy within reasonable limits beyond 20 shots. That reduces single-shot accuracy significantly, but allows a rifleman to maintain accurate fire over time. Now, accuracy beyond the first shot is relative to the rifle's kickback, or stability. The active stabilisation mechanism in the A2 works such that it is activated by the first shot, using the recoil to stabilise the weapon. This mechanism puts strict limits on how accurate the weapon can become. However, in semi-automatic mode the mechanism is disabled and you rely entirely on the passive recoil reduction components. This allows for much higher accuracy in semi-auto mode than in either full auto or burst modes, where the latter are effectively no different.

Heat ratings are 8 – 6 – 3. Every adjustment increases heat generation in the weapon, and we can't change its ability to dissipate said heat. The extra jump for semi-auto is because disabling the active stabilisation mechanism actually increases heat generation.

Part of the reason why we developed the switchable fire mode was to replace the now-aging Vindicator frame. The M-15 Vindicator is a newer weapon than the M-7 Lancer, originally a replacement for the even older M-96 Mattock, and is technically a _battle rifle_ rather than an assault rifle. This reflects its use as a designated marksman rifle, with high stopping power and burst fire only. It is meant to be accurate and effective at mid-range engagements, bridging the gap between the short-to-mid-range "spray and pray" assault rifles and the mid-to-long-range sniper rifles. It is a category of weapon that is of questionable use in modern warfare, given that most light sniper rifles, such as the Viper, are best used in a similar role.

Logistically, reducing the overall number of different weapons handled by Alliance logistics would be beneficial so long as it does not negatively impact operational efficiencies. The A2 accomplishes this, by bridging the mid-range gap nearly as well as the Vindicator does. This, however, does not mean that Vindicator frame weapons are ineffective, useless, or outdated. They are still quite popular around the galaxy, as are the older Mattock models that are particularly common in colonial militias and on the second-hand civilian market as a hunting rifle. They are also much more popular – and useful – in the Terminus, where their greater stopping power makes them more effective against the thicker armour you encounter out there.

Additionally, the Vindicator is the primary 'competitor' to the Avenger frame for dominance in assault rifle design. It's a very clear second, but many high-end rifles use this design rather than the Avenger. My own subsidiary Rosenkov Materials has an assault rifle model, the Kovalyov, based on the Vindicator frame.

 ** _Spectre HMWA Mk VIII 'Advanced Gear'_**

 _Fire type: Full auto_

 _WDAH rating: 3 – 9 – 7 – 8_

First things first: I am not delusional, and will readily admit that Spectre gear blows anything and everything my company produces out of the water. If this _wasn't_ the case, then Close Corporation would immediately become the new manufacturer of Spectre gear.

It is worth noting that the HMW Master Gear series is technically illegal in Council space. That is, it is not licensed per the CSGR. This is entirely on purpose; only Spectres are supposed to have these weapons, and Spectres are literally above the law. It was never the intention that the CSGR would become a way for Spectre gear to always be better than the best weapons available on the market, but that _was_ nevertheless a consequence of the regulation.

The HMWA Mk VIII, as the top-of-the-line variant of the HMWA Advanced line, is made from premium materials that does wonders for both weight and heat dissipation. Very few people have ever been allowed to work on one of these rifles, much less disassemble one to see its construction, but it _has_ been tested, so we know its WDAH. It outperforms any other assault rifle on the market on both damage and accuracy. It has the same accuracy rating on the first shot in full-auto as the A2 has for its semi-auto calibrated single shot, which – if I'm quite honest – blows my mind. Most likely this is because the rifle's guide rails are somehow able to maintain a very narrow confinement tunnel through the barrel without impacting its rate of fire or reliability, which is normally a very well-established trade-off.

Notably, the next step up on the HMWA ladder swaps the Avenger frame for a Vindicator frame weapon, the Spectre HMWA Mk X 'Master Gear'. Rated at 2 – 10 – 10 – 9, it is a hugely impressive piece of engineering. Rosenkov Materials' Kovalyov variant of the Vindicator is the second best weapon in this design frame, and the best of the licensed models, but it is nowhere near the HMWA Mk X. Still, as the Alliance _has_ decided to keep the M-15 in their stock, this does mean that my company will get the chance to work on the next developments in that frame as well.

* * *

...

 **Author's notes: I do not own Mass Effect.**

This is mostly an attempt to make sense of the differences between ME1-era weapons and the weapons of ME2 and later, beyond the obvious thermal clip design change. Ever notice that there are only two designs for assault rifles in ME1? Well, apart from the Geth rifles, that is. It's true! They all look like either the Lancer/Avenger, or like the Vindicator that we know from ME2 onwards. Hopefully this should explain how that's possible. And keep in mind, throughout the first game we never cross into the Terminus. The closest we get is Hoc (Virmire), which is still in the Traverse. Now, we probably _should_ see some Terminus-design weapons in the Traverse, but we never do. This has to do with cost, reliability, and sourcing: The only enemies we come across that aren't either Geth or organised pirates, are, well, _dis_ organised pirates whose prey are largely in the Traverse and the border regions with the Council. Which means most of their weapons would be from those areas as well.

With the upheaval in weapons design between the first and second game, this status quo will change as the less flexible Council-compliant manufacturers struggle to restructure and the much more agile Terminus manufacturers turn around much quicker and are able to standardise much more easily and readily with the design simplifications that come from the introduction of thermal clips.

 **RadioPoisoning** : The flechettes are not (necessarily) solid chunks of material. They are nanostructured, so you get a lot of structural volume out of a small omni-gel volume. Simplistically put, it's like a balloon; when you blow it up, you change its size but not the amount of material making it up. And no, Javelin likely won't show up... at least not for a while ;) I love that gun, though, so I really want to cover it. We'll see if I can sneak in something in the main fic to justify it here!

Thanks everyone for reviewing! It makes my day! :D


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